Labor Just Can’t Help Themselves

Before the last election, Anthony Albanese promised “safe, minimal change”. It was a lie even bigger than Jacinda Ardern’s “open and transparent” whopper. Just as Ardern ran a regime of unprecedented, paranoid secrecy, Albanese has busily imposed an agenda of radical, race- and class-warfare antagonism.

Last year, Albanese diligently set about dividing the country by race – attempting, in fact, to do so permanently by trying to alter the constitution to enshrine racial separatism. Having failed in that one, Albanese has switched to the left’s other favourite divide-and-rule: class warfare.

With the economy swirling around the s-bend, mostly thanks to old Marxist Albanese’s disastrous policies, he’s determined to cast blame anywhere but home. Naturally, Mr “Fight Tories” (it’s of a piece with his sad, desperate ‘cool dad’ act that he can’t help but sound like a particularly shitty old Billy Bragg record – it’s a wonder he isn’t shouting ‘Thatcher!’) is trying to blame the ‘rich’.

And attacking the aspirational middle class.

His broken promise on stage three tax cuts are designed to punish the middle-class and reward the benny class. His puppet-masters want him to go even further.

Negative gearing and tax breaks for asset owners should be scrapped to fund wholesale reductions in income tax rates, Labor luminary Bill Kelty says, as progressive independents and big business pressure the government to overhaul Australia’s tax system.

Before the crucial Dunkley byelection next month, the Coalition is arguing Labor cannot be trusted to avoid revisiting Shorten-era tax concession changes after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reneged on his commitment to leave stage 3 income tax cuts unchanged.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said this week the government was not “contemplating or considering” changes to negative gearing, franking credits and the capital gains tax discount.

Not until the byelection is done, anyway. Dunkley is a formerly rusted-on Labor seat that’s in grave danger of falling. If it does, it will be yet another fatal blow to a government elected on one of the smallest primary votes in Australian history.

Praising Labor’s stage 3 changes for the help they gave low- and middle-income earners, Kelty said some young people were paying an effective marginal tax rate of more than 50 per cent when factoring in university fees, GST and private health insurance.

Except that university fees and private health insurance aren’t actually taxes, you absolute knobhead. This is as dumb an argument as Joe Biden’s claim that, if you took out price rises food, energy and housing, there was no inflation.

Kelty’s claim that young people can’t afford homes because they “didn’t have rich enough parents” is yet another garbage argument. They can’t afford homes because Albanese – and every government of both stripes before him – insists on flooding the country with nearly half a million migrants, every year, year on year.

Kelty is determined to prove that there’s never enough of other people’s money to satisfy a socialist.

New Treasury data released on Wednesday showed the government would forego an estimated $26.8 billion in revenue due to negative gearing concessions by 2025–26, up by a billion dollars since last year’s estimate […]

Tax exemptions on superannuation earnings remain the largest portion of lost government revenue, at about $56 billion in 2023–24.

The Age

In both cases, it’s not that the government is paying out money, it’s that they’re being denied the opportunity to get their claws onto more and more of other people’s money. And why should they get more? As Kerry Packer astutely observed, it’s not as if they’re spending it wisely enough to deserve more.

As for cutting negative gearing, like all government meddling in the housing market, it will only make things worse.

Small landlords – the bulk of rental providers – will simply flee the rental market. The shortfall of rental properties will grow exponentially worse and rents will skyrocket even more.

And renters simply aren’t going to pull the money for a home-loan deposit out of their arses.

If the government really wants to do something meaningful to ease housing pressure – stop importing millions of foreigners.