Morrison's plan to have taxpayers looking after some people's mortgages and house deposits is not encouraging. If the receivers of such charity blow it - as many will - the banks just sell the properties, and the mess is paid for by taxpayers.

This article clearly composed, I believe, by a fiscal illiterate. Has thoroughly disgraced, trickle-down economics written all over it and represents the entrenched ideological idiocy that has sent this country from the third wealthiest and a creditor one at that, to somewhere south of thirty and one mired in debt. With a significant portion of our tax bill just going to service interest charges on owed money!

For the year ended 2017, the ABC reported that the highest amount of tax paid by any Australian company as actual dollars received by the ATO after the churn that's called reconciliation was just 13 cents in the dollar, with some getting it down a low as 4%, with a reported 40% paying none?

Meaning a flat tax rate with no reconciliation would collect 2 cents more in the dollar from those that paid the most or highest, 11 cents more in the dollar from those whose creative accounting and offshoring had gotten it down to 4 cents in the dollar paying an additional 11 cent in the dollar, thereby making offshoring so counterproductive as to be too costly to continue!

Ditto those not paying any (about 40%?) who would then have to stump up the entire 15 cents on every dollar of earned income. Provisions could be made for farmers to spread their income over seven years combined average gross profit only, and even then only pay tax on the actual adjusted profits.

Other than that, New startup co-ops could be accorded a five year tax holiday?
TBC Alan B.

Cont.
We need smaller government not less social justice spending!

Simply put, we can have one or the other. And the tier that must be dismantled is the only (have your cake and eat it too) tier we can do without, the (middleman) middle tier.

Given everything they do can be done and without significant staff increases! By the federal government and local government. Assisted by massively increased regional autonomy! Together these long overdue reforms would save the taxpayer around 100 billion per!?

So, we can massively cut the tax rate and simultaneously massively increase the tax revenue stream and minus reconciliation or any associated tax compliance costs, which would effectively return an averaged 7% to the average bottom line! meaning the real tax and related would max out at 11% in real terms!

The only reason we haven't had this long overdue reform in the most over-governed country in the world bar one is because our lacklustre politicians are not there for us but their mates and on both sides of the aisle!?

The greatest cost and impediment on business here in Oz is not wages but the enormous albatross of energy costs! Which could be as low as a cent PHWH, if we embraced MSR thorium technology and used it to thoughtfully dispose of the world's stockpile of nuclear waste and in (walk away safe) reactors that are safer than coal-fired power cleaner and vastly cheaper. And be paid annual billions for (completely safe) service provision!

MSR thorium would also allow the continuous production of alpha particle bismuth 213, and open up significant medical tourism by cancer suffers with death sentence cancers, and seeking medical miracles. And able to be rolled out, along with MSR thorium, in depressed rural and regional areas, needing economic stimulus!
Alan B.

Cont.
The flat tax rate envisaged would be set at 15%. With the threshold raised generously to add social justice to those wage earners living below the poverty line. And the only reform that ends forever, ubiquitous bracket creep!

100 annual billions? Would allow an infrastructure roll-out of hitherto unprecedented proportions and possibly require the importation of some specialized guest labour to get some of it done.

(Massively overdue decentralisation) VLT very rapid rail, MSR thorium and deionisation dialysis desalination on a truly grand scale to effectively drought proof the country and place to take full advantage of the next boom, a food boom e.g.?

We need real Leaders with real vision coupled to proven management skills and equipped with some new ideas for a new century. Same old, same old business, as usual, have placed us where we are today. In a country where the inmates (idealogical idiots) have taken over and running the (asylum) country?

Thus we see articles like the above, presented as if they had any saving grace or even the whiff of a scent of a new idea!
Alan B.

About 30 years ago I did an extensive survey of literature on GDP growth and government spending share, using a range of techniques. All showed that growth was optimised with government expenditure at or close to 22% of GDP. This is hardly surprising: a low-taxing, small bureaucracy state will encourage enterprise and innovation. As bureaucracy grows, initiative is stultified - I speak from experience in the UK, Australian and Queensland governments. As for Tony Makin, who I have known for a long time, he is amongst the best macroeconomists in Australia. He and I were amongst the few to point out at an early stage of the GFC the inevitable consequences of the Rudd/Henry spending splurge, which continues to drag down the economy. The Coalition has lost sight of the advantages of fiscal prudence, perhaps the best Finance Minister we've had was Peter Walsh who was a major contributor to the successes of the Hawke government but unfortunately has not been a model for his successors.