Chalmers’ idea of budget sustainability lacks credibility

In aiming for budget sustainability, Treasurer Jim Chalmers talks up the obvious notion of productivity, but sadly offers very little to achieve it (“Death taxes? Certainly not: Jim”, 20/6).

The union movement will ensure that industrial relations reform goes nowhere and his insistence on a subsidy-driven Future Made in Australia has the same economic authenticity as Donald Trump’s wonder economy behind tariff walls.

The depth of Labor’s economic thinking can be seen in its waving away of death taxes. There already are de facto death taxes, when children pay at least 15 per cent on the taxable component of the super of their deceased parents. But the government’s boneheaded decision on large super funds will cause many individuals, once they have met a condition of release, to bail out of the system, tax-free, altogether.

Bob Miller, Leederville, WA

Treasurer Jim Chalmers claims he wants all options and ideas on the table at his forthcoming roundtable to lift productivity.

Yet he dismisses any ideas of cancelling Labor’s destructive IR legislation and its destructive energy policies, two of the most potent examples of Labor’s contribution to Australia’s continuing fall in living standards.

As David Pearl predicts (“Roundtable plea a Chalmers con job, not a conversion”, 20/6), Chalmers’s modus operandi is, and always has been, to camouflage an ideological and socialistic agenda with expansive but basically shallow and illusory rhetoric.

Peter M. Wargent, Mosman, NSW

Jim Chalmers’s claim of a “moment of truth” on Australia’s economy misses the mark.

If he considered wealth creation, he would have to admit net-zero policies would tank our economy while doing zilch for global emissions – Australia’s carbon footprint is negligible compared to China’s massive emissions annually (“Chalmers’ moment of truth”, 19/6).

Instead, Chalmers buries warnings of economic trouble in excuses for new taxes, eyeing “unearned income” from personal assets. Pre-election boasts of a strong economy have morphed into cries of faltering government revenue, with “valid programs” needing funds. If truth mattered, Chalmers would own up: government spending stoked inflation, eroding savings while inflating asset prices – prices Labor now wants to tax before they’re realised, with no sensible offsets. With 100,000 super balances over $3m, up to half a trillion could shift from equities to non-growth assets to dodge his volatility tax. This all smells like a Baldrick-level “cunning plan”.

Craig Mills, Kew, Vic

In his address to the National Press Club this week, Jim Chalmers defended his plan to tax unrealised capital gains on the basis that the Labor Party has got a mandate for change.

Chalmers has to get real if he is to be credible. In reality, the only governments that “have a mandate” are those that receive a majority of votes. As two-thirds of the electorate did not vote for the ALP with their primary vote, it is a clear indication that the ALP has no such mandate. Many who voted for the ALP most likely did not support taxing unrealised gains. So, this government has no mandate at all to introduce the taxation of unrealised gains. Chalmers’s wish is not the will of the people.

Geoff Ellis, Smithfield, Qld

Our economy is going backwards. The only growth in employment is with unproductive government jobs. Net zero is a nonsense that is characterised by the avid pursuit of the unattainable.

And soon, we are going to have a non-conference of 25 people sitting around the table shuffling papers. Our government seems to have no other agenda beyond giving money away to be re-elected, and destroying the productive private sector of the economy with taxes, realised and unrealised, to get the money to do so. The lucky country is now the stupid country.

Alexander Haege, Tamarama, NSW

Unfortunately, Jim Chalmers has forgotten these profound fiscal adages from his youth: don’t put your money in a bottomless bucket; look after your pennies and the pounds will look after themselves; don’t count your chickens before they are hatched, and so on. Now what we are left with is a prelude to yet more taxes.

John Bicknell, Bargo, NSW