Scott Morrison is Australia’s biggest taxing prime minister since John Howard. He imposes a taxation burden on Australians that is much higher than when Labor was in government, and he is hellbent on ensuring that the dip in tax revenue caused by the recession is reversed and taxes soar back to the heights he previously “achieved”. By 2025 he intends for us to pay well over half a trillion dollars a year in tax.
That’s the truth, according to Morrison’s own budget papers.
Press gallery stenographers, however, are happy to repeat verbatim Morrison’s lies about his government being committed to lower taxation. It’s a serious journalistic failure that misleads readers, and augurs poorly for coverage of the coming election campaign.
The fiscal picture will change somewhat when the government unveils the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook tomorrow, but the trajectory will not: this is a high taxing government. This is how much the government has taken and expects it will take in taxes, in cash terms and in terms of GDP.
Taxes under Labor averaged 20.9% of GDP. Under the Coalition, they’ve averaged just over 22% of GDP. The budget earlier this year sees the government taking an average of 21.3% over the next four years.
Even during the pandemic and recession years of 2019-20 and 2020-21, Morrison was still taking more than Labor ever took in taxes. But at least the pandemic and the recession thwarted Morrison’s plan to re-impose punitive Howard-era levels of taxation — the 2019 budget forecast tax: GDP levels of well over 23%.
That is, Morrison and Frydenberg’s mythical “Back in Black” campaign was on the basis of jacking up taxes to more than three percentage points of GDP higher than Labor. To see journalists peddling the claim that Morrison is committed to lower taxes, despite what’s there in black and white in budget papers, suggests extraordinary laziness, or something even worse.
Morrison is addicted to high taxes because he’s also addicted to high spending. He presides over the biggest government of the modern era, with spending soaring to nearly 28% of GDP in 2019-20 and nearly a third of GDP in the pandemic year of 2020-21. All entirely justified, of course, but he plans to keep spending at over 27% this year and next, and over 26% for the following two years. In 2025, five years after the pandemic began, Morrison’s government plans to still be spending a third of a point of GDP more than Kevin Rudd spent at the height of his stimulus program in 2009.
If this funding was being spent on nation-building or improved education and health services, it could be portrayed as sensible investment in our nation’s capital stock at a time of record low interest rates. But much of the spending was either wasted — via the tens of billions lost in JobKeeper payments to profitable companies — or handed to the government’s mates. Tens of billions in subsidised rail infrastructure for coal companies (faked up as capital investment); handouts to fossil fuel companies that — unlike the rest of us — pay no tax; bribes to the National Party; and billions in rorted grants programs.
Too many journalists see fiscal policy through a prism crafted by John Howard and Peter Costello — that the Liberals are the party of small government and low taxes. Howard and Costello ran a party of big government and punitively high taxes. But Scott Morrison goes one worse — his government is one of taxing Australian workers and businesses and channelling the proceeds to its friends.
The Muppets are clearly running the ‘biggest’ government in Australian history in terms of fiscal expenditure. And the wealth distribution to which it subscribes is clearly the most inequitable, to the point of corruption. Add to that the effective destruction of a competent, independent public service and it hard not to conclude that it is now the worst Australian government in history before we get to the serial cavalcade of incompetence and outright corruption on many other fronts. It is depressing that such a demonstrably awful government has a chance of re-election.
The numbers don’t lie, Bernard. However, to what extent can the increased expenditure (and taxation required to support it) be attributed to worthwhile social programmes with long lifetimes, which were the Labor initiatives? The NDIS and Gonski spring to mind. Don’t get me wrong, I believe these are things on which it is worth spending money, and don’t detract from the evidence of boondoggles like Sports and Car Park rorts, and other handouts to Coalition mates.
Another way of looking at the tax:GDP ratio is to note that GDP has not grown as fast as tax. And the low rate of GDP growth, driven solely by population growth due to net migration, is another dent in the Coalition “better economic manager” argument.
I don’t make a living from observing these things, so it beggars believe that journalists who are paid to observe, notice and report such things, can still have jobs.
The Australian Institute did a comparison between liberal and Labor’s economic management, one noticeable difference was under Labor the GDP averaged a growth of $2billion Per year more than the LNP. This is one reason why Labor tends to have a lower tax to GDP ratio.
Journalists are paid by their employer. The trouble is that Nine/Fairfax is run by Peter Costello (Howard’s treasurer), Seven West by Kerry and Ryan Stokes (good friends with a number of Libs including Christian Porter), and News Corp by Rupert Murdoch (who has a hard-right bias). Meanwhile, the ABC seems to chicken out on holding the government to account for fear of its funding being threatened. All this adds up to a media landscape that strongly favours the LNP. It’s not the journalists’ fault; he who pays the piper plays the tune, and the journos have mortgages to pay and families to feed.
Keane, the media are never going to stop misleading the public. What, two thirds, three quarters of what passes for news sites are owned by Murdoch, Nine or Seven West. Why would they tell the truth? Truth is not in their interest. Better to blame their readers/viewers for short attention spans, lazy intellects, and a desire to only ingest that which reinforces their beliefs.
Who are you addressing this to Bernard, the owners of the majority of mainstream media, is this a plea for no corruption, for fairness?
It’s great that you keep us informed, like the article yesterday about Morton’s memo and many other quality insights you unearth but this one has a very strange heading.
Is the trend to tepid journalism a generational thing? You know, millenials bringing their thin skin and narcissism into the workplace?
Or is it “he who pays the piper calls the tune”, with most journalists paid by Murdoch or Nine in this country?
You’d think being a journo banned from a Morrison presser for asking impertinent questions would be a badge of honour and supported by your editor. But if your capacity to churn out column inches is compromised, well the news room budget doesn’t allow for non productive resources. We’re going to have to let you go. And stick to listicles.
Not to mention their Sargasso sea of shallow knowledge, constantly centripetal due lack of curiosity or awareness of the world.
We did invent ‘selfie’.