Divergence, I'm disgusted by the lies. I had hoped for better with the view that the pain Gillards carbon tax lie brought to Labor should have been a useful object lesson. Apparently not.

I'd far rather that they had gone back to the electorate with a clear plan for what they intended to do than to push ahead and hope people were over it by the next election.

R0bert

Exactly Divergence!
Rhrosty.

What a bunch of shortsighted whingers.
Come the next election.
The carbon tax and its effects will be gone.
The debt will be reduced.
The spending will be under control and deficits will be a thing of the past.
Taxes will be lower as will unemployment and a sensible funding model will be acheivable for the NDIS.
The boats will be stopped.
And major infrustructure projects will be underway.
The state liberal governments will have sorted out the problems in education and health and funding for the ABC and climate change research will produce results agreeable to liberal voters.

The Commission of enquiry into unions will totally discredit the current cohort of labor politicians and the ructions within labor will destroy it as a prospective government


Who will then vote to retur n to Labor mismanagement until Shortens replacement?

@Rhrosty and Divergence. Some good ideas there that should form the basis of an intelligent debate about future tax reform, and I use "reform" in its true sense of being an improvement. The Henry Report also had a mass of suggestions that have been almost completely ignored, first by Labor and now the Coalition.

I would add a few other suggestions, such as ensuring that foreign companies such as Apple and Google pay a fair rate of tax on their Australian earnings instead of using foreign tax shelters to pay only a derisory amount.

Unlike Nutter and his mates I do not think that the electorate will forget everything by the time of the next election any more than they forgot Labor's broken promises. Abbott has the additional problem of a likely hostile Senate for the next three years.

Anybody (including some of the commenters here) who think the problems will have been solved over the next 28 months are simply delusional.

Excellent post, Divergence. (In fact, most of the comments here have been excellent.)

That same research you cite has found that 'Every $1 billion extra we spend on tax concessions for super saves less than $200 million off the age pension budget.'

The government superannuation contribution scheme needs to be completely scrapped - not overhauled, not reformed - scrapped.

However, it's a $1.5 trillion industry, much of which is syphoned off into commissions and profits for the banking industry. Its only other accomplishment has been to use the public purse to finance the early retirement (55 years) of a generation of well-paid salary earners, who could have easily financed their own retirement at age 60-65 without taxpayer help anyway.

At the same time, it has seriously failed low-income earners and completely overlooked those who fall outside the permanent salary-earning system - casual employees (mostly male labourers and low-skilled women), the self-employed, carers and homemakers (mostly women) and the disabled.

These are the people who are being forced to retire at 70, not the taxpayer-funded superannuants. How many more times does the retirement age have to be raised before we realise what a monster Keating created?

We should scrap the GST and simply have a small turn over tax. The total turnover of all shares, derivatives and currencies in Aust is $135 trillion. Just a 0.1% tax or $1 in $1000 tax will raise an extra $135 billion. There will be no need for all this austerity nonsense.

I did a job for a Prof of Taxation some years ago.He said the whole system needs to be scrapped but powerful interest groups like it that way so they can evade paying tax.

The big corps pay almost no tax and a turnover tax with no input tax credits,catches almost everyone.