Newspoll and Essential Research both had polls last week, and since we’re probably not due yet for a ReachTEL (the last was three weeks ago), we presumably have a lean week coming up. The latest BludgerTrack update accounts for the two aforesaid polls, and they have had the most minimal of impacts on the voting intention aggregates, on which the biggest move is a 0.6% drop for One Nation. The seat projections have the Coalition up one in Victoria and Western Australia, and down one in Queensland. A new set of leadership ratings from Newspoll makes a modest addition to the established pattern of improvement for Malcolm Turnbull, with Bill Shorten flatlining. Full results through the link below.
Compact Crank @ #198 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 12:39 pm
Whether you think rising inequality is a problem or not depends on which end of the inequality you are on.
Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough about this for now: I don’t want to get a reputation for carrying on and on with an argument. I better get on with something productive/constructive before the sun gets too low in the sky.
I might drop by a bit later on.
Player One @ #201 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 12:54 pm
Oh, and I should have added that the most successful con trick the Tories have ever pulled – both here and in other countries – is in making people believe they are on the opposite side of that inequality to the one they are really on.
This one constantly amazes me 🙁
Meher – 12:54pm
I largely agree with your last 6 paragraphs. I fear that the disengaged, fearful of radical change, types in the middle might plumb for truffles when they front upat the ballot box and that could be decisive. In that regard there might be some resonance with where we are now and where we were in early 2001. …
C@tmomma says:
Sunday, June 24, 2018 at 11:52 am
Our resident ‘Green’, Rex Douglas:
He was a lot harder to take as a concern troll.
😆
‘Fess,
There has been no White House Briefing for the last 3 days! No wonder Sarah Huckabee Sanders had time on her hands enough to go for a drive to get some food.
However, it’s obvious what their strategy is here. Keep the merry-go-round and the Trump whirling dervish moving right along until the heat has gone out of the immigration issue and then just come back as if nothing has happened.
lizzie,
Not to mention gays in poly-cotton socks! 😳
Further to Meher:
“… a sizeable proportion of Millennials are far more attracted to a redistributive policy approach than was the generation before them at their age. “
Quite rightly too, given the Howard MO of stealing nearly everything that belongs to the future and gifting it to baby boomers. The nexus between the GCT concession and negative gearing is a classic example. As is the Franked dividend rebate to retiree investors. The private health care rebate is another stonkingly expensive example.
My view – go after the rorts, fund the services and programs that are required to fund the 21st century, fix the budget and THEN we can talk about tax relief for the top 3 economic deciles. Not before.
I was interested to read meher baba trying to convince us that the economists associated with the Hawke-Keating government were superior to those associated with the Labor Party today.
They may have been good but I would think that the economic firepower that Labor has at it’s disposal right now- Dr Andrew Leigh, Dr Jim Chalmers, Dr Stephen Koukoulas, plus many others not as well known in the public sphere, are just as good.
Meher, the thing about Labor’s current policy platform is that it is addressing the structural time bombs that can no longer be sustained.
No matter how these policies effect you as an individual, as a structural whole, govts’ (into the future) budgets cannot afford to sustain them as each year the inequality and top-heaviness is increased to breaking point.
The pool of taxpayers, esp young taxpayers, has diminished as the pool of dependents has grown. And those dependents are not just aged pensioners (as was the case way back when). Many dependents take welfare or benefits unnecessarily i.e. they can afford to pay their own way but there are perks and rorts that allow them to use govt subsidies to give them greater financial comfort.
Some say this is aspirational living.
But when you REALLY think about it, it is becoming a kind of feudalism that a society like our cannot and should not even attempt to sustain.
Why are Libs so afraid of dissent? They even shut down any debate.
Meha Barba
I sometimes disagree with all of what a person may contribute – and you are in that catagory
I speak as a fully self funded retiree – as is my wife
I am quite happy to remit tax at 15% of my Allocated Pension, the first $100,000- exempt rather than the dog’s breakfast this $1.6 Million cap per individual account holder is
I am retired and I employ well respected Fund Managers – because I am retired (all I do is monitor performance)
I don’t want the crap the Liberals have introduced
It is just too much trouble
You support the Capital Gains Tax exemptions and Negative Gearing
No doubt you support being able to so arrange your tax Affairs to receive an amount over and above a declared dividend – at whose expense again?
Me?
I rejected that invitation on ethical considerations – so earn 2.7% on Term Deposit in lieu
So I do not own Telstra shares – or any shares outside my suoerannuation accruals
Such is my risk preference
I speak as a parent to 5 children all successful in the work place but where retrenchments and “Productivity” see them with expanding responsibility and longer working hours – including losing a day off because of a Public Holiday so the Public Holiday being what is otherwise your day off
Employment on a project by project basis then retrenched – relying on interim casual and part time employment pending the next project
And Child Care being linked to employment
I respectfully disagree your presumptions
Read Stieglitz
Andrew
I am with you. Proper funding for health, education, welfare etc is way more important than tax cuts for high income earners.
Trump tried talking about child victims of violent crime to stop people talking about his policy of forced separations, as if the two are analogous, but gave up when that didn’t work. I expect we’ll see some other disaster of their own making crop up which will distract people from the fact they have no clue how to reunite the stolen children with their families.
Then again, he’s been making noises about meeting with Putin.
Compact Crank @ #105 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 8:07 am
I never made any claims about who would or wouldn’t win. I merely expressed bewilderment as to why the Libs decided that Darling Ranges was more important than the federal seat of Perth. Since winning Darling Ranges does bugger all to change the power balance in the WA parliament, yet winning Perth would shore up a micro-thin majority in Canberra, it seemed a strange move.
Upshot is, I have nothing to apologise to you for, and therefore will not be doing so.
C@tmomma says: Sunday, June 24, 2018 at 1:15 pm
‘Fess,
There has been no White House Briefing for the last 3 days! No wonder Sarah Huckabee Sanders had time on her hands enough to go for a drive to get some food.
*******************************************************
She is just another VICTIM – “Trump supporters are being harassed all over this country by a hysterical left unwilling to accept the decision, and the will of the American people who put Donald Trump in office. These unhinged leftists are normalizing outrageous behavior which is only getting worse according to Jeanine Pirro on Fox
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/fox-news-host-jeanine-pirro-bemoans-loss-civl-discourse-sarah-sanders-booted-restaurant/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-rank-and-file-evangelicals-arent-likely-to-turn-on-trump-over-family-separation/
RW evangelicals….reactionary by any other name.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-do-men-think-it-means-to-be-a-man/
Very interesting, very pertinent.
C@tmomma: ” I was interested to read meher baba trying to convince us that the economists associated with the Hawke-Keating government were superior to those associated with the Labor Party today. They may have been good but I would think that the economic firepower that Labor has at it’s disposal right now- Dr Andrew Leigh, Dr Jim Chalmers, Dr Stephen Koukoulas, plus many others not as well known in the public sphere, are just as good.”
As far as I am aware, Chalmers is not an economist: I believe he has a PhD in political science. Leigh’s PhD was in economics, but I was under the impression that it was focused more on the “softer” social science side than on the hard-edged modelling that underpins good tax and fiscal policy. I don’t believe Koukoulas has a PhD in anything, and he seems to me to be more of a source of strong (and entertaining) opinions than of detailed analysis.
I was thinking of the likes of Ross Garnaut, Fred Gruen, Bob Gregory, David Morgan, Mike Keating, Don Russell and Ken Henry.
I don’t believe the guys you’ve mentioned come close to the ability of these luminaries.
What I find fascinating about the current so-called debate vis. Income aspirationals vs. fairness is that a root and branch reform of the structural time bombs, taking on not just the baby boomer boondoggles, but corporate tax shenanigans in all their various forms (tax expenditures, egregious deductions, inadequate taxation of resources exploitation, not to mention industrial scale tax avoidance and evasion) when the government could actullay do both.
Having thought about personal income tax in the context of the current debate, there are two points of principle that emerge that accord with my own political beliefs.
Firstly, with the median income stuck at $44,000 and the average full time income stuck at around $87,000 (I think from memory. Propeller Cap Boy can correct me) that there is no need in the foreseeable future for the thresholds for second and third tax rates to be lifted beyond about $45,000 and $90,000 respectively. There is no5 a case to lift the third rate threshold up to $120,000 in my working lifetime.
Secondly, there is no case to abolish the 3rd income rate entirely. It undermines the principle of progressive taxation to its core.
That said, and proceeding on the presumption that services and programs are properly funded I do see a case for reducing the rates of tax further. If it were affordable I would strongly support the following:
Tax free threshold ~ $20,000
1st (low income rate) – 19% between the tax free threshold and $45,000
2nd rate – 28% between $45,000 and $90,000
3rd rate – 33% between $90,000 and $180,000
4th (and highest) rate – 40% for all income earned over $180,000.
Now that would cost the treasury a bomb. More than even truffles plan, but the key question is: can it be paid for by other revenue means and still leave enough over for legitimate government spending? Such is the size of the current structural timebombs, that if these were diffused then the answer to that question would be yes.
meher baba @ #196 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 10:22 am
I put it to you that all of those things would’ve changed with or without deregulation/privatisation. Technology advancement and customer demand would’ve done more to change these practices, particularly technology.
meher
But is this simply a case of someone in the past always has more stature than someone in the present?
For starters, you’re judging people after a lifetime of achievement, not half way through it.
Re the issue of redistribution – particularly between the baby boomers and Gen X and the Millennials- I’m mildly in favour of it.
However, Labor’s approach seems to me to be more focused on preserving the benefits enjoyed by the boomers – unlimited tax-free super, neg gearing, CGT discount, etc. – and taking them away from Gen X and the Millennials. So it’s effectively about redistribution within generations rather than between generations. The proposed dividend imputation changes are perhaps a minor exception to this, in that they will affect some boomers more than anyone else.
If Labor really wants to be redistributional, and affect boomers as well as those younger than them, it would look at policies such as:
applying a 15 per cent tax to all superannuation income received by over-60s, including those on pensions from defined benefits schemes;
putting an upper limit on the value of the family home that is exempt from the pension asset test; and
limiting the amount of assets that can be negatively geared against earned income, with no grandparenting clause (ie, so it applies to everyone from a certain date).
These measures would be much fairer IMO, but would adversely affect many more people, so of course they are less likely to be considered.
And I’m not sure that any such harsh taxation measures are truly necessary right now anyway. Bracket creep and house price inflation (even with the CGT discount) continues to fill government coffers quite nicely. In the absence of any major new spending initiatives, the deficit problems are set to decline over the next few years. I personally can’t see the urgency. Perhaps best to leave well enough alone.
Dan Gulberry @ #222 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 12:04 pm
Prime example being the rise of ATMs and EFTPOS as completely negating the need to get to a branch before 5pm on a Friday in order to have cash for the weekend. Technology has also improved the speed at which money can be transferred internationally.
‘The banks were open from 10-3 Monday-Thursday and 10-5 on Friday. If you couldn’t get to your bank on Friday before it closed you faced a cashless weekend. To get a bank loan required a humiliating level of groveling to the bank manager, who would ask you intrusive questions about your life’
Well, only one of these things have changed!
Our local banks are open 9.30 to 4, scarcely significant.
We’ve recently got our mortgage extended, but it was on our third try. We’d rather have grovelled to the local bank manager, because all our local bank managers know us well; instead we had to go through an equally intrusive process which ultimately went nowhere on ridiculous premises.
It was only when Which Bank changed from centralised loan assessments to regional ones that we got anywhere.
But did you feel the same way about them 30-40 years ago when they were still forging names for themselves?
Snap zoomster!
Sorry, to finish: so the first has only changed minorly, the second has changed because of technology (and these changes were well advanced before deregulation – I got my first Commonwealth ATM card in 1976) and the third got mucked up because of technology – removing the human element and local knowledge from the decision making process.
Dan Gulberry:
The pre-1980s Australian banking sector was an non-competitive club protected by a raft of government regulations. They had little incentive to invest in any new technology or new business practices, so they generally didn’t. Maybe they’d have eventually gotten around to the sorts of changes we now take for granted, but, without the introduction of genuine competition into the sector by Hawke-Keating, it would have taken them a lot longer IMO.
Shanahan must be getting really excited!
A 🙂 and 🙁 film clip from the NYT.
NYT Opinion
@nytopinion
We reimagined Trump’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ as a 1940s propaganda film. Watch:
https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1010356431684538368/video/1
Imagine if the CPG played this game with Scott Morrison — every time he speaks in public is proof he’s undermining his leader.
confessions: “I was thinking of the likes of Ross Garnaut, Fred Gruen, Bob Gregory, David Morgan, Mike Keating, Don Russell and Ken Henry. I don’t believe the guys you’ve mentioned come close to the ability of these luminaries.”
But did you feel the same way about them 30-40 years ago when they were still forging names for themselves?
I should probably have made my point a little differently. Chalmers (who is not an economist) and Leigh (who is a different sort of economist) have embarked on political careers and are not suddenly going to transform into macroeconomists with a great technical insight into the taxation system. They may well go on to have stellar political careers, but that’s a different pathway.
I don’t really know enough about Koukoulas’s abilities: he seems to me to like to be a bit of a bomb-thrower, which again is something different to what I’m talking about with Garnaut, Gregory, Henry et al.
My main concern is that I don’t see the same quality of economic expertise coming through to Labor (or the Libs for that matter) through the Grattan Institute and other think tanks, or even the public service, as the Hawke-Keating Government received from a combination of academia, the public service, and some political advisers (eg, Craig Emerson early on, then Don Russell, John Edwards and others).
I’m probably just a grumpy old man yearning for the golden age, but it’s how the situation appears to me right now.
poroti @ #230 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 12:21 pm
It isn’t hard to reimagine though, is it?
‘Dr Andrew Leigh, Dr Jim Chalmers, Dr Stephen Koukoulas, plus many others not as well known in the public sphere, are just as good…..’
I think you’ll find that as exellent as these individuals are – especially Chalmers, good communicator, plain speaker..- no one in the real world has ever heard of them or could identify them in a line up…..and….I thinkers would be very interested to know that the ALP is stuffed full of economists with actual qualifications as opposed to the used car salesmen running the other show…..whenever I tell people Bill Shorten has an MBA they almost pass out from the vapors…people just don’t know this stuff……the other day when Hanson made that dumbarse comment about Labor being like the Tin Man with no brains I almost choked on rage…..but that sort of shite resonates with alot of people, it reinforces their misconceptions……..I’m gonna have a drink…
Meher:
“However, Labor’s approach seems to me to be more focused on preserving the benefits enjoyed by the boomers – unlimited tax-free super, neg gearing, CGT discount, etc. – and taking them away from Gen X and the Millennials.”
Simply not true. Just because someinitiatives are ‘granfathered’ Doesn’t mean that there is not an overall inter-generational redistribution when examining the suite of Labor’s policies as a whole.
Besides, the big change announced this year – the abolition of the dividend cash backs, will not be granfathered at all.
Further, Labor doesn’t support ‘unlimited’ tax free super. That claim is quite wrong. Contributions sourced from income are taxed at 15%. The earnings of super deposits are similarly taxed until the retirement of the beneficiary. As I understand it, it is still labor policy to tax withdraws upon retirement at 15% for all withdraws in excess of $75,000 per year. You want a flat 15% tax on all withdraws by retirees from super. That sounds suspiciously like a flat bang you over the head approach to an issue that Keating warned us about. I for one would oppose such a measure. That is not to say that I wouldn’t support reducing the threshold or add in another threshold – all withdrawal over $150K pa being taxed at say 30%, but why should genuinely modest self funded retirees have to pay an additional tax on their very modest super pension?
As for other initiatives – millenials would still get a tax benefit vis negative gearing and a more modest and affordable GCT concession if they invest in new build properties. So that doesn’t fit in with your analysis either.
Finally you completely jump the shark. You seriously expect Labor to put the family home into the asset mix to assess the eligibility for the aged pension? One might as wind the Labor Party up (I’m sure Rex and Eddie would love that) and hand the keys to the lodge to the LNP for the next 50 years (and Truffles would love that). Politics is of course the art of the possible and surely someone like you knows that in the current climate the family home is verboten.
Good afternoon all,
Some interesting Reachtel seat polling for Mayo, Longman and Hinkler on the way.
As a totally unbiased labor voter I have strong faith in seat polling today and very proud to be hypocritical depending on the result !
Cheers.
meher baba @ #230 Sunday, June 24th, 2018 – 12:14 pm
Competition in the banking sector was pretty much a non-event. A lot of overseas based banks opened shop in Australia then found they couldn’t get to the point of critical mass, and subsequently had their Australian operations bought out by the big 4.
The big 4 were also allowed to swallow up smaller Australian based operations and have, in the fullness of time, become an even more non-competitive club. The big 4 all own around 14.9% of each other. They need special permission from the Treasurer of the day to get to 15% or more. What that means is that the big 4 have a vested interest in their competitors doing well, otherwise that affects their own profitability.
End result – an even more non-competitive, almost cartel like banking sector.
meher:
I’m not an economist so cannot comment on the qualifications or expertise of the former or present group of Labor’s advisors.
I just think that as zoomster said, we often forget that people who have stature and authority now didn’t always have that, most esp when they were forging their careers. Incidentally, of the people you’ve mentioned, I only know of some of them (Garnaut, Henry, Morgan) because of their latter, more recent careers, not because of who they were 30 or so years ago.
A superannuation payment is an income stream in exchange for lodging a lump sum. Each pension payment comprises part income and part a return of capital, just as a mortgage repayment comprises part interest and part repayment of the capital.
Until 2006, the income portion of a superannuation pension was taxable because it was income, just like term deposit interest, dividends or salary. That makes perfect sense. The capital return portion of a pension payment was not taxable because it wasn’t income, any more than a withdrawal from a bank account.
The maths can get messy for pensions because life expectancy comes into it, but actuaries do these sorts of calculations and the income-capital split would be shown on a payment summary for the pensioner’s tax return.
This made perfect sense. Lump sum taxes were introduced to stop privileging superannuation lump sums over pensions. There is no argument to privilege the income portion of superannuation pensions over any other income by making them tax free. To do so is an enormous drain on public revenue, maybe part of a ‘starve the beast’ strategy. In any case, the pensioners and their employers enjoyed huge tax concessions on the contributions they made during their working lives.
Superannuation pensioners are now eating their cake. They can’t still have it. The pre-2007 status should be restored.
Disclosure: I am a self funded retiree on a superannuation pension
Confessions
Yes indeed and the equivalent Australian 1940s films about the ‘Japs’ would so easily see Scrott Morrison and the Uber Tuber fitting into them. Although Mr Harbourside Mansion would be used as the main voice over, acting as the calm voice of ‘reason’ .
So from the latest Reahtel Mayo poll Georgina is a further 4% more on the nose.
Where can one find the Rechtel polling?
Doyley – I’m interested in Longman and Hinkler
For those poo-poohing Chalmers et al … I give you Scott Morrison … a mere honours degree in Economic Geography and Lawyer, Cormann in charge of our finances.
We have some VERY well educated Laborites on the front bench.
One thing about being well-educated, is that unless your degree is highly specialised (some sciences/medicine etc.) your ability to explore knowledge in other areas, transfer concepts and acquire a broad knowledge base is more likely than say, a real estate salesman with limited vocabulary and research skills.
And just to add on Meha Babba, I started out in the banking industry in 1964
Your presentation on banks and banking is totally and absolutely uneducated crap of the first order
Branch Managers had no discretion to approve loans
They attended Applications for Advance which were submitted to Head Office for either approval or decline including on purpose by Federal Government instruction in the regulated banking industry
Limited lending discretions to Branch Managers did not come into being until after deregulation and the impacts of that deregulation
With all due respect, you have no credibility whatsoever
Regarding the missing Sarah Huckabee Sanders. This was posted June 19. Prophetic?
Comic and comments at: http://amultiverse.com/comic/2018/06/19/huck-you/
Observer: “With all due respect, you have no credibility whatsoever”
Gee, that’s a bit harsh: especially the “with all due respect” bit (which of course always means none whatsoever). I know I’m just an anonymous bit of code on the world wide web, but there’s no need to get nasty.
Re the banks: maybe I haven’t characterised the improvements to the sector through the deregulation applied under Hawke and Keating as well as I might have done. But there was a big shift towards customer-focused banking in that period. Far from perfect, but a lot better than we had experienced before then. There was a time when the Labor leadership used to trumpet their achievements in this respect (perhaps not so much nowadays).
Where I suspect I would find agreement with some of you is that I was never completely convinced that selling the Commonwealth Bank was such a great idea: likewise Medibank Private more recently. I consider that there is an argument that the government having a continuing presence in the market for some services helps to put a bit of pressure on the other players to avoid anti-competitive behaviour and other abuses. Unfortunately, I think Hawke and Keating saw dollar signs flash and were motivated by all the good things they saw they could do with the money raised by selling the CBA. I don’t think it has worked out quite as well as they expected.
A deep thinker like Dutton:
50 50 in longman and 62 38 in mayo