Politics with Michelle Grattan: Graeme Samuel on ‘doomsday’ attacks on the federal budget |
This year’s federal budget has been the most controversial since the Abbott government’s 2014 budget, with Labor struggling to sell its new capital gains tax changes and crackdown on trusts.
Its changes have produced howls of outage from those potentially affected, and criticism from some experts.
But there have been notable supporters of the changes. Those in favour find some echoes of past tax reform from the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello years.
We’re joined on today’s podcast by Graeme Samuel, the former head of the national competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. He’s a long-time participant in and observer of economic reform, including helping, as the head of a business group, usher in the goods and services tax (GST) back in the 1990s under the Howard Coalition government.
Samuel says the latest budget’s reforms “are actually quite mild” compared to how much Australia was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s.
What Treasurer [Jim] Chalmers has done here is to try and remove the distortions that have been built into the [tax] system through successive governments – I have to say primarily Coalition governments – which have feather-bedded, if you like, those that have got vested interests. For example, in investing in capital and taking capital gains at an extraordinarily generous 50% discount rate.
What Treasurer [Jim] Chalmers has done here is to try and remove the distortions that have been built into the [tax] system through successive governments – I have to say primarily Coalition governments – which have feather-bedded, if you like, those that have got vested interests. For example, in investing in capital and taking capital gains at an extraordinarily generous 50% discount rate.
Samuel says the fierce criticism of the Labor changes shows why politicians have been scared of real reform for too long.
For decades now, we have asked, urged, exhorted, pleaded with our politicians to bring about tax reform. So Treasurer Chalmers does it in this........