DEAR News Of The Area,
I HOPE that the total inability of the coalition to provide a coherent economic narrative during the election campaign finally dispels the complete myth that they are always better at managing the Australian economy than Labor.
Despite constant repetition of the rhetoric, this claim lacks any substance.
Surely being able to tell the Australian people a simple story and defend it is easy once you clearly understand what you want to do – provided that what you want to do makes sense.
The story the shadow treasurer told us during the election campaign came from an economic sleep-walker, dreaming that the rhetoric about superior economic management was true.
So much of Australia’s short-term prosperity is determined by global factors.
Lucky governments are in power at the top of the cycle and unlucky ones just happen to be there at the bottom.
Good economic management is about how you steer the country through the bad times and how you prepare for the bad times when things are good.
Hawke and Keating modernised the economy.
That Howard managed to leave the budget in surplus was commendable.
However, with windfall gains from global growth and a booming economy, his selling off 167 tonnes of our gold reserves at the bottom of what is a cyclical market and baking middle-class welfare into future budgets to get votes in the short-term was irresponsible.
The Rudd government steered the country through the global financial crisis thereby avoiding a recession.
Morrison’s giving away billions of JobKeeper dollars to ineligible businesses without a mechanism to get overpayments back was economic incompetence.
This JobKeeper free-pass is hard to reconcile with the ideological zeal his government used to unlawfully pursue poor people for fake Robo-debts – which ended up costing more than it recovered.
Following on from their irresponsible petrol excise give-away proposal, the latest piece of economic garbage from the coalition is to argue against removing the concessional tax rate of 15 percent for superannuation fund earnings on balances over $3m.
The coalition has never understood that superannuation is about workers funding their own retirement to avoid reliance on a taxpayer funded pension.
Superannuation is not about providing tax concessions for wealth creation nor is it intended to be a mechanism for transferring that wealth to future generations.
If the coalition were responsible economic managers, they would recognise that wealthy people should not be entitled to unlimited tax concessions and that there is a need to rein in the exponentially increasing cost of superannuation concessions to the budget.
They would also realise that it is the younger generation and ordinary pay-as-you-earn tax payers who are subsidising this largesse for a small number of wealthy people who will never need to rely on the pension for their retirement anyway.
I see that Sussan Ley said the Liberals now stand for fairer taxes.
The question is, fairer for who?
While ever the coalition remains this out of touch, they deserve to stay in opposition.
Regards,
Stephen OTTAWAY.
