MORE PEOPLE RENTING
RENTERS ON RISE AS HOME DREAM FADES
THE AGE 29 August
by Matt Wade
The share of Australian families that rent has drawn level with those who own their homes outright, as a growing number of young people appear to be giving up on the dream of buying a house.
The proportion of households that are outright home owners has fallen from almost 42 per cent in the mid-1990s to 30.9 per cent in 2011-12, new Bureau of Statistics figures show. That is the lowest proportion collected by the bureau’s survey of housing occupancy and costs, which started in 1995.
The share of renters has risen nearly 5 percentage points to 30.3 per cent in the same period. The proportion of households paying off a mortgage has risen from 30 per cent to 37 per cent.
Sydney University housing expert Judy Yates attributed the decline in total home ownership – from 71 per cent to 67 per cent since the mid 1990s – to the spiralling cost of housing. ”This is all about affordability,” she said.
But Associate Professor Yates said the decline in the share of outright home owners was also being driven by well-established families using their mortgages to fund other purchases, especially investment properties.
CommSec chief economist Craig James said Generation Y – now aged in their 20s – seemed to have a different outlook on home ownership to previous generations: ”There has been a major change in attitudes concerning home ownership, with renting continuing to be preferred – either because Generation Y is choosing a different lifestyle or because the cost of purchasing a home continues to lift.”
Associate Professor Yates said the rising proportion of renters would exacerbate wealth disparities. Figures released by the Bureau of Statistics last week showed 90 per cent of families in the least wealthy fifth of Australian households were renters. In Sydney, the proportion of renters (34.6 per cent) is now higher than the share of households that own their home outright (26.8 per cent).
The average number of bedrooms in Australian households has grown from 2.9 to 3.1 since the mid 1990s. More than three-quarters of Australian households had at least one spare bedroom.
The survey of nearly 15,000 Australian households found one in five were spending more than 30 per cent of their income on housing costs, a proportion experts describe as financial ”housing stress”. Average housing costs in capital cities were 44 per cent higher than in regional areas.
THE BANKING SCANDAL CONTINUES – UNIMPEDED
I became increasingly concerned as the Australian banks eschewed any semblance of proper risk management when they continued their aggressive lending against bubble-inflated land values over the last sixteen years. (Don’t bubbles burst?)
Australia’s bubble is amongst the world’s largest and it’s certainly primed to burst, despite the vacuous arguments of bubble denialists. The Rudd government merely delayed the pricking of the bubble, and Tony Abbott now has few options available to keep it inflated. One can only hope the Liberal government can satisfactorily manage its deflation, but there’s little reason to believe Tony Abbott even understands the problem.
So, the US having led the world with its bubble experience, I’m not at all surprised to see yesterday’s Bloomberg headline US bank legal bills exceed $100 billion as a result of their financial crisis. Running to the law won’t deal with the intrinsic problem, but it may help banks brazen it out.
In recent years, as all the action hasn’t been residential, I’ve also watched the excellent work Denise Brailey’s BFCSA has been doing trying to rectify the misfortunes of investors who’ve been ripped off by the banks and property-based investment schemes.
Throughout all this, I hear people argue the banks are only doing their job by providing credit, and that people have to take responsibility for their own purchases and investments. That’s true, but most people don’t understand a thing about real estate bubbles, whereas the banks are experienced in cynically playing them for all they are worth – then seek to be bailed out when they burst. Absolutely incredible corruption!
That’s why I can’t vote for either major party in the upcoming election. They’ve both presided over part of the period of Australia’s greatest banking scandal without intervention. I’ll be looking for a smaller party in the Lower House and voting for Denise Brailey’s Australian Voice Party in the Senate.
THE RECORDING
SCENE: ARIZONIA LATE 20th CENTURY
When NASA was preparing for the Apollo Project, astronauts were taken for training to a Navajo reservation in Arizona.
A Navajo grand elder and his son happened to come across some of the space crew.
The elder spoke only Navajo, and got his son to ask: “What are these men in the big suits doing?” One of the astronauts replied that they were practicing for a trip to the moon.
When his son relayed this comment, the Navajo elder seemed to become animated and asked if it would be possible to give to the astronauts a message to carry with them to the moon.
Recognizing a promotional opportunity when he saw one, a senior NASA official accompanying the astronauts said, “Why certainly!” and got one of the men to bring a tape recorder.
The Navajo elder made some brief comments into the microphone. The intrigued NASA official asked the son who was chuckling to translate what his father had said, but he refused, and they went their on way.
The NASA people took the tape to a nearby Navajo village and played it for members of the tribe. Though it provided much merriment to the villagers they, too, refused to translate the elder’s moon message.
Eventually an official government translator was summoned. After much laughter, the translator relayed the message: “It says watch out for these people. They have come to steal your land.”
PROBLEMS WITH PROPERTY
Dr Kate Shaw provided lively moderation at last night’s public meeting on the Problems with Property – to a packed house at Melbourne’s Loop Bar.
The three speakers were:
(1) Marcus Westbury from Renew Australia who recounted taking novel steps to assist in resurrecting the high number of vacant commercial properties in Newcastle. Although speaking primarily about commercial property, Marcus highlighted a difference between investment and speculation and believed Australia’s superheated residential market was facing a major correction.
(2) Karl Fitzgerald from Prosper Australia saw tax reform as essential to freeing up the residential market, including the 90,000 properties currently held vacant in Melbourne. Land taxes, and an end to negative gearing, would help put an end to the artificial scarcity developed by those simply investing for capital gains.
(3) Joel Pringle from Australians for Affordable Housing spoke of the blight of an inadequate housing supply, whether for owner occupation or rental in Australia. He touched on the coalition he represented and noted the first home buyers’ grant was simply capitalised into higher prices.
Each speaker and a number of questioners bemoaned the low priority given to housing affordability during the current federal election campaign.
One thing that came through was Australia’s split personality on the issue of housing affordability: older people are quite happy with their escalating house prices, even though they have the effect either of locking their kids into impossible mortgages or locking them out of home ownership altogether.
Perhaps this generational tension is why the major political parties can’t confront the problem of Australia’s hopelessly unaffordable housing?
It was great to see three different groups coalesce to discuss the Problems with Property. The concern of participants at the Loop Bar that housing affordability had to be addressed and taken further was palpable.
Then, on the way home, my MYKI* ticket got rejected at Parliament Station. The MYKI system hadn’t been able to credit the $10.00 I had deposited into my MYKI account on 27 June yet. That’s correct; back in June. [!] The credit’s in there today though. Oh! That’s right! MYKI tells me it goes in to your account the day after you get rejected for having insufficient funds if you don’t travel by train often enough – unless, of course, I were to go to a 7/11 store to recharge my card, instead of having tried to do it much more conveniently on-line. [??!]
Impossibly-priced housing, plus *a hopelessly expensive public transport ticketing system which doesn’t work. Welcome to “Marvellous Melbourne” 2013, folks!
IT’S HOUSING AFFORDABILITY SWINGS ELECTIONS
Except for some sort of miracle, Australia is going to have a Liberal Party government from September 8th.
The budgetary shortfall of $30 billion in the Liberals’ promises won’t count against them.
Tony Abbott’s stupidly costly paid parental leave proposal won’t matter.
These things only matter to ‘welded on’ Labor supporters.
However, nether was it Kevin Rudd’s pink batts, nor his mining tax, nor Julia Gillard’s carbon tax, nor the minority government, nor Labor’s economic competence that sealed its doom.
Those issues matter only to ‘welded on’ Liberal supporters.
Journalists might run through a litany of possible contributors to the swing against the government and to the opposition, but they will always miss out on the one critical element.
It is what usually–if not always–removes the government of the day:-
It is only the swinging voters who will ensure there’s a change of government. More particularly, swinging voters (a) who have taken out a mortgage in the last few years, or (b) who are currently unable to afford a home.
(a) because this group is finding it increasingly difficult to service their bubble-inflated mortgages, and believe the Labor government is totally responsible for this, and
(b) because the frustrations of this group have also spilled over onto the incumbent government.
Oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them. However, the primary cause–how the “hip pocket nerve” is faring–seems always to become lost and invisible to journalists and punters, even to the swinging voters themselves. This is because we tend subconsciously to project any personal budgetary shortfall onto some aspect of the government other than the subliminal concern of the swinging voter: housing affordability.
Here’s the evidence since 1972:-
THE ECONOMY IS IMPORTANT, BUT …..
I listened with interest to Hugh McKay on Saturday Extra this morning speaking about Australia’s need for a vision which might include a greater egalitarianism.
Hugh McKay is an erudite and interesting social researcher, always worth reading or listening to.
However, there it was again …. the “but”. Of course the economy is important, but we also need to have a vision for Australia. If Hugh were Prime Minister, he would have members of parliament show respect to each other no matter their divergences of opinion on matters. The economy is important but we need a vision that would include the egalitarianism that used to distinguish Australia, McKay opined.
But, Hugh, the economy is life. What if a reformed economy was the vision? What if there was an economics that ensured a greater equality of access to education, food clothing and shelter …. the greater egalitarianism you seek?
And there is.
It’s a sad fact of life that many decent people will shuffle off this mortal coil without ever having seen the cat.
REAL ESTATE: WHY DO WE CHECK OUR BRAIN IN AT THE 1%’s CLOAK-ROOM?
I think Deakin University researcher Philip Soos may have his tongue planted firmly in his cheek in this piece:-
Australian Housing Market Special
By Philip Soos
They’re expressing concerns about high housing prices in Australia! For goodness sake! Streams of commentary about first home owners having to take out big mortgages. Poor them! For example, TV producer and freelance writer Tom Whitty’s article in The Age.
When will they come to understand growing housing prices are good for us? (Meaning, for we who matter.) After all, we have most of you onside already: almost 70 per cent of Australians own their own home, and close to two million own an investment property. But best of all, the majority of property is concentrated into the hands of we, the one per cent!
And as prices increase, so through the wealth effect does consumption. Everyone should be happy: owner-occupiers, investors, bankers, insurers, real estate agents, not to mention our political parties. As your house prices skyrocket, there’s you free ATM: more cars, holidays, furniture, conspicuous consumption – indeed, the Australian way of life.
Some even claim a housing bubble exists! We have been hearing this nonsense for years now, and still no “bubble” burst! Misguided propagandists and self-promoters Steve Keen, David Collyer and the MacroBusiness crowd have all been proven wrong. So relax, folks, there is no bubble!
Such people are patently un-Australian, seeking to undermine the faith we Aussies have in rock solid real estate. In fact, there has never been a better time to buy! Mark Bouris, the upstanding director of Yellow Brick Roads, a wealth advisory firm, knows that property will continue to boom into the future.
What makes land valuable is the rental income it produces, net of land tax and rates, which is then capitalized into a market price at a discount rate. If land tax and rates are removed, this leaves more rental income for the owners, thus making land more valuable. Prices increase as a result.
There can be no downside! Theoretically, with a financial sector ready to provide every greater fool with loans they have little hope of ever paying off, the price of land is infinite.
Simply put, any impediment to rental incomes and/or capital values should be eliminated. This has the effect of freeing up much rental income to be capitalized into prices, including the leverage from bank credit. Higher prices obviously mean more debt repayments to the banks, enriching them in the process. This is bad? If we are serious about promoting the goal of higher prices, politicians must be willing to do the right thing and enact policies to make property even more attractive, for the sake of banks and our good selves.
To this end, all political parties in Australia need to support the “Rentier”, primarily in the form of tax expenditures: the owner-occupier exemption from capital gains and land taxes; from income tax; GST on imputed rents; the 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax for investment properties; and, of course, negative gearing. These tax expenditures are quite hefty, reaching $50.4 billion in 2005-06, and $53 billion in 2007-08, with a greater proportion rightly going towards the wealthiest households. Why miss out on these?
The Howard government set the course by providing 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax in 1999 for investments held for at least one year, but it is now time for this tax to be scrapped entirely. Why not allow the backbone of the economy, we property investors, to fully privatize the uplift in their land values? The most pernicious of all taxes, the land tax, must therefore also be eliminated. After all, if owner-occupied residential property is exempt, why not all property?
On a positive note, state governments have started to make further inroads by increasing the thresholds for land tax; but, of course, it’s best not to penalise we landed gentry and speculators at all. Income taxation on any positive net rental cash flows should also be permitted to go the way of the dodo, and owner-occupiers must be allowed to deduct mortgage interest costs against their personal tax liability, as in the United States, which is even more generous than Australia’s negative gearing. We have much to learn from the great US in this regard.
Much like land tax, council rates have the unfortunate effect of lowering land values. Local governments may complain if we reduce council rates, but an alternative revenue stream might come in the form of grants from state governments raised by increasing inefficient payroll taxes and motor vehicle duties. Already a positive move in this direction has been made by converting from site value rating (SV)–basing rates upon land value only–to Capital Improved Value (CIV) which now taxes both land and dwellings in many areas across Australia.
Certainly, in Melbourne, where housing prices have boomed more than any other capital city, every municipality now bases their rates upon the land and dwellings, rather than land alone (Monash was the last holdout). If we are to optimise real estate profits, council leaders in Queensland and New South Wales (where SV still remains the rating base but is fortunately being overcome by “minimum rates”) should also enforce a reversion to CIV rating, if not the abolition of rates altogether.
As stamp duty has the effect of slightly depressing housing values, it should also be eliminated and gambling taxes on ne’er do wells used to plug the hole in revenues.
The federal and state level First Home Owner Grants (and Boosts) worked spectacularly to inflate housing prices in 2000 and 2008. It is to be commended as a bonanza for vendors -the more important party in the exchange. Unfortunately, the Western Australian government has lowered and restricted grants to newly constructed homes: this restriction should be resisted!
Fortunately, with privatization, deregulation and liberalization of the financial, banking and real estate sectors gaining pace throughout the 1980s under the Hawke and Keating administrations, the Labor government has jettisoned any pretence of still being a traditional labour or socialist party and fallen into line with their rent-seeking Liberal colleagues.
Ex-Prime Minister John Howard ranks deregulation as one of his greatest achievements. The Big Four banks – CBA, ANZ, WBC and NAB – now own and control the entire banking system and the parliaments. This is all to the good. While some may allege the FIRE sector is a cost centre to be minimized, it is rather a profit centre which must be maximized for the sake of Australia.
With the Coalition, Labor, Greens, ASIC, APRA, ATO, RBA, economists, journalists and mass media now in our pockets, finance is now free to predate upon the middleclass and the poor. The persistent interloper, Denise Brailey, and her so-called Banking & Finance Consumers Support Association is proving to be a fly in our ointment – though luckily APRA and ASIC claim they know nothing.
Just as the banks properly own and control the financial and political system, property developers are learning to do much the same with new housing construction and fringe land on the outskirts. They are showing enterprise in bribing councillors at the local government level. This tends to yield attractive returns.
The move away from efficient and affordable government development of local infrastructure (or the private alternative) towards developer charges has served to make new property more expensive. This has proved a bonus for everyone involved.
Infrastructure is very important to land owners, as it helps to increase the value of our real estate portfolios: that’s why property magazines encourage we investors to buy near infrastructure corridors. Government knows how to finance infrastructure to our benefit, utilizing user-pays rather than beneficiary-pays systems. Case in point is the British commercial whistle-blowing landlord Don Riley. When the taxpayer-funded extension to the Jubilee Line through South London was completed in the late 1990s, it raised the value of his office properties by more than all the taxes Riley had paid over the last 40 years.
Clearly, windfall profits from infrastructure are a godsend to we propertied class, and these have occurred with the assistance of the Howard/Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments. New research shows residential land values rise by around $50,000 for a house located close to a railway station in Melbourne. Be there! Buy there!
Self-managed super funds (SMSFs) have also become a popular method of minimizing property tax liabilities. Before retirement, both capital gains and rental income are taxed at 15 per cent, falling to 10 per cent for capital gains if the property is held for more than one year. After retirement, there is no tax liability on either. Any and all liabilities should be removed to promote greater investment through SMSFs.
While much has been made of foreign investment in the residential property market, the government is quite correct to provide little information about such investment. If Australians are becoming hesitant about taking on more debt, the obvious alternative is to open our borders to foreign investment to take up the slack. It’s arguable foreign investment needs to be deregulated further for best practice’s sake.
Whilst not impacting upon housing prices as much as speculation, rising rents (imputed and actual) remain a blessing for we owners. The Labor government under Rudd and Gillard has gifted landlords with manna from heaven, cramming our cities full of immigrants from 2007 onwards in order to raise our rents, generating the financial stress that will keep the plebs subservient. It may sound harsh, but it needs to be remembered renters are simply vermin. The government has also enacted the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) to subsidize we investors, ostensibly for the benefit of our tenants. Smooth!
Along with the NRAS, the Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) scheme is another policy the FIRE sector should well support, because it increases tenants’ purchasing power, placing upward pressure on rents (at the expense of taxpayers). To assist landlords, it’s hard to better increasing the subsidies to the NRAS and CRA schemes, combined with a doubling of our immigration rates.
Australian Housing Market Policy Overview | ||||
Policy | Status | Note | ||
Poor | Improving | Excellent | ||
OO exemption from capital gains tax | X | Tax treatment of owner-occupier housing superb apart from lack of mortgage interest deductibility. Accounts for almost 70 per cent of total housing stock. | ||
OO exemption from land tax | X | |||
OO exemption from imputed rent (income tax) | X | |||
OO exemption from imputed rent (GST) | X | |||
OO mortgage interest deductibility | X | |||
Property investor capital gains tax discount | X | Investment property not treated as well as owner-occupier stock, there is still room for more improvement. | ||
Income taxation on rental income | X | |||
Negative gearing | X | |||
Land tax on investment property | X | |||
Council rates on residential property | X | CIV better than SV. | ||
Stamp duty discounts | X | Need more discounts. | ||
Federal/State First Home Owners Grant/Boost | X | Subsidies too low. | ||
Financial deregulation | X | FIRE sector very powerful, able to lend out colossal amounts of credit to any NINJA. | ||
Ability to engage in predatory lending | X | |||
Hiding widespread loan application form fraud | X | |||
Buying off regulators (APRA and ASIC) | X | Coalition, Labor, Greens, RBA, APRA, ASIC, ATO, economists, experts, journalists and mass media in pocket of FIRE sector. Conformity to party line impresses Pyongyang. | ||
Rendering RBA and ATO impotent | X | |||
Purchase of political parties and democracy | X | |||
Ensure academia too cowardly to do anything | X | |||
Ignoring experts’ conflicts of interest | X | |||
Mass media reliance on FIRE sector advertising | X | |||
Maximize immigration flow | X | Need more taxpayer subsidies and immigrants to increase rents for landlords. | ||
Increase Commonwealth rent assistance | X | |||
More taxpayer funding of NRAS program | X | |||
Make SMSF property more attractive | X | SMSF rules improving. | ||
Implementation of developer charges | X | Developers corner all land allotments. Must step up bribery of councillors. | ||
Developer land banking | X | |||
Council politicians in pocket of developers | X | |||
Increase infrastructure construction | X | Must increase funding. | ||
Government-sponsored mortgage insurer | X | Far behind the US in this regard, need to further socialize risks and costs. | ||
Government-sponsored security guarantee | X | |||
Government-sponsored mortgage enterprises | X |
With up to thirty-two policies to choose from, our governments have plenty to consider when enacting landlord-favourable economic reform. Although housing prices are currently at historical highs, there is plenty of room for improvement. With enough effort and commitment to such critical reforms, average prices may be able to reach $22.4 million by the time we turn 85 years of age, according to “Property Professor” Peter Koulizos.
Under this scenario, the price to income ratio will rise to 50, experienced also in newly progressive places such as China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The noxious influence of the social welfare sector, namely the Australian Council of Social Service and Australians for Affordable Housing, should be destroyed, along with those “academics” and “researchers” claiming a real estate bubble exists. They simply can’t be brought to understand there’s no bubble and that high prices are good for Australia.
Ministries of Housing should be privatised and run by State real estate institutes in order to ensure only the correct information, vetted by responsible experts, is reported in the mass media and journals of professional opinion.
RP Data Rismark, APM and Residex should be elevated to the level of gods and any of their contradictory analyses assiduously overlooked. State and territory government instrumentalities are to be commended for selling their data collection to these bodies.
The real estate-run Ministry of Housing could also help re-educate people from the falsified history of housing and land markets. Australian history is littered with such misinformation that “asset bubbles” end in recession and depression. It is even said the early 1970s saw the build-up and subsequent collapse of dual commercial and residential bubbles, when we all realise it was nothing of the kind: it was simply the OPEC crisis.
Then there’s a bubble now, they say. Harrumph!
It’s important the public remain ignorant of the fact that large land owners never pay a cent in tax. Productive businesses and labour can continue bearing the brunt of government revenue (from the 419 taxes and tax-like fees, their deadweight losses and administrative costs). The middle class and the poor must know their place and rank, and be kept in it.
We must acknowledge the hard work of Andrew Wilson, Christopher Joye, Mark Bouris, Bill Evans, Enzo Raimondo, Lucy Ellis & Co. who constantly advise there is no bubble, thereby promoting our views.
It’s high time the Australian public got off its high horse and stopped complaining about high housing prices and rents. If they were to open their eyes, they would see it is in their best interests to maximize land owners’ returns. It is quite un-Australian to dream of financial stability, small mortgages, fair pricing of consumption items and low debt servicing ratios.
In a post-industrial society the FIRE sector is clearly our saviour. It only remains for the GST to be increased to 30 per cent to aid with the program of eliminating all property taxes.
As a most influential person was wont to say: “Only then will cultural learnings of the FIRE sector for make benefit glorious nation of Australia.”
HOUSING AFFORDABILITY (CONT’D): “STOP THE WASTE”, MR ABBOTT?
Thanks to Dr Gavin Putland for this suggestion:-
Could cheaper housing pay for Tony Abbott’s promises?
Housing is unaffordable because there isn’t enough of it where it is needed (that is, where the jobs are!) or because too much of it is held off the market while the owners wait for “capital gains”. In either case, the rental value of the underlying land is not fully realized as rent paid to a landlord, or as earning opportunities enjoyed by an owner-occupant (“imputed rent”), but is wasted because the required housing has not been built or isn’t fully occupied.
This waste is encouraged by the tax system. Why spend any of your money to build apartments and pay tax on the rental income, if you can spend all your money on vacant land and pay tax on only half the “capital gain”? Why live in the house you own, when only absentee owners are allowed to claim “negative gearing”? Why build a dwelling to let, if you can claim “negative gearing” by simply buying an established dwelling? Why keep your investment home occupied, if you can claim “negative gearing” by making the home “available” to let while demanding too much rent or being too picky about tenants?
One way to “stop the waste”, as Tony Abbott might say, is to tax wasted land as if it were not wasted, so that the owners can’t afford to waste it. For income-tax purposes, let every non-owner-occupied property be deemed to be earning an annual rent of at least 7.5% of the site value — that is, 7.5% of the value of the land and airspace, excluding buildings. If the property earns more than this Minimum Deemed Rent (MDR), it is taxed on what it actually earns; if it earns less (or nothing at all), it is taxed on the MDR.
Because the MDR ignores values of buildings, it does not penalize construction, and is not unduly ambitious when expressed as a rental yield (7.5% of the site value is a lower percentage of the total value). If your property is fully developed and fully let, it will already be earning more than the minimum rent, so the MDR won’t affect you. But if your property is grossly underdeveloped or underoccupied, the MDR will increase your taxable income, hence your tax bill. No longer will you game the “negative gearing” rules by demanding too much rent or being too picky about tenants, because you’ll pay tax on the minimum rent whether you get it or not.
Under no circumstances will it be possible to “pass on” the MDR in higher rents. The MDR imposes a tax penalty for not having a tenant, forcing you to reduce the asking rent to attract a tenant. Until you get a tenant, there is no one to whom to pass on the penalty; when you have a tenant, there is no penalty to pass on.
If you are land-rich but income-poor, any additional taxable income due to the MDR will fall in a low tax bracket. If your tax bill still isn’t low enough, you really ought to get a tenant or several.
I note in passing that if every mortgage were deemed to be yielding at least a certain minimum rate of interest for tax purposes, lenders would have an incentive to reduce the principal on non-performing mortgages, so that the Minimum Deemed Interest would not lead to bigger tax bills than the mortgages are worth. This simple and permanent tax reform could avoid the need for more radical temporary measures such as jubilees, court-ordered cram-downs and eminent domain.
To estimate how much revenue the MDR would raise, let us suppose (conservatively) that rural land is already fully utilized, so that the additional revenue would come from Australia’s residential and commercial land, whose total value is about $3 trillion. If 1/15 of that is unoccupied (to say nothing of how much is underused), that’s $200 billion of site value, on which the MDR (at 7.5% per annum) would be $15 billion per annum. At a marginal tax rate of 30%, the extra revenue would be $4.5 billion per annum. That may not be enough to fill the black hole left by Mr Abbott’s middle-class welfare, corporate welfare and tax cuts. But every little bit helps.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING?
BE AT THE LOOP BAR, 23 MEYERS PLACE, MELBOURNE 6:30 – 8:00 PM MONDAY 26 AUGUST!
RSVP HERE