Nice to see the following three points in the draft of taxation policy at the Australian Council of Trade Unions’ 2012 Congress:-
24. Congress calls on the Government to examine the following proposals:
a) Negative gearing should be confined to the same source income. Losses arising from owning an investment property should not be able to be deducted from taxable income earned in other ways.
b) Stamp duties should be replaced with a broad-based, progressive land tax with a generous tax-free threshold. The land tax should include provisions allowing asset-rich, income-poor households to defer payment of liabilities.
c) The First Home Owner Grant should be phased out. The Grant is largely counter-productive, as it has led to an increase in property prices. Assistance to first-home buyers should be targeted towards the construction of new dwellings.
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It might assist the Labor Party to take note of these suggestions and start to return to its roots, especially concerning land tax. In many areas, it has become indistinguishable from the Tories.
I touched upon the fact here and here that a land tax had always been Australian Labor Party policy, and former secretary of the party, Cyril Wyndham, took it upon himself simply to write the plank out of the party’s platform in 1964. Well done, Cyril! I guess the policy to reinstate the federal land tax removed by Bob Menzies was a bit too embarrassing for you?
Except for that bit about a “generous tax-free threshold”, the ACTU is in now almost line with the recommendations of the Henry Tax Review on land tax.
Maybe Treasurer-in-waiting, Joe Hockey, is also? Speaking at the National Press Club today, he berated the minority Labour government for not bringing in Ken Henry’s tax reforms. [!]
Oh? So, I guess we can expect the Libs to abolish all the taxes recommended by Ken Henry’s panel, improve the mining tax so badly stuffed up by Labor, and call for the States to implement a single-rate all-in land tax?
That’s something Australians will look forward to with great anticipation, Joe!
I was surprised to see ‘Bob-a-job’ you know the campaign of the 1980’s singing the old town hall solidarity songs- written as psy-op pieces of the Rhodes- institute,, Buy Australian while we off-shore it, free tariffs, to go wander brands, and the chorus but I’m one of you-and we are all one for one and for all mantra, that is code slang of the ACTU, and like the ‘ugly step child’ of the Labor party that remains locked up in the attic, a (metaphor), their was, the usual, have we been neglecting you attention baby talk. Yes Rent-seekers and Landlords can never make the boast at a dinner party to be GAINFULLY employed, unless they think that rushing around doing the paper shuffling in an administration job, that requires the white collar and tie, but that’s what tax minimising accountants are paid for, which is tax deductible. There I go again with my class war, and had they had mutual obligations on rent seekers and negative gearing rebates, with fortnightly interviews to check that activities are being conducted
In order to secure and become independent of workers and their taxes, then they who whinge of a loss of productivity after abolishing the 150 taxes on production as well as high land prices, that manufacturing loves to flee to low rent Asia, then they can stop the whinging in the media. Instead they think unleashing drones to survey the younger discontent hoods is a far better way to advance Australia fair, and foul. The social contract between generations needs to be healed, instead of being skewed as it has been done by Baby Boomers for the last thirty years to kick the can down the road and leverage themselves by making losers out of young people, by ripping them off, and keeping them in permanent Austerity impoverishment and out of home ownership.
But its too late, and the Baby Boomers will get to see 1969 summer of whatever, except
Instead of wearing their beads and hair shirts, their uniform morphed or substituted
For the Gestapo of grey power luminary’s, who evade responsibility and scrutiny?