Tax and Squeeze: Labor All the Way

Taxes up, working and middle-class Australians being squeezed of every penny, the beneficiary class ballooning… Tell me this isn’t a modern Labor government.

Just don’t try and tell me that Labor is “the party of the worker”.

It hasn’t been true in decades. Labor is now unapologetically the party of the bosses and the bennies.

Consider, after all, its last and current leader. Bill Shorten was the son of an engineer and a lawyer/academic, who went to the best schools and universities and never worked a day in a blue-collar job in his life. Shorten married further and further up the money tree until, by the time of the 2019 election, Labor functions more resembled the Birdcage marquee at the Melbourne Cup (yep, Shorten hung out there, you bet).

Anthony Albanese likes to blatherskite that ’e grew up in a cardboard box in a lake, but his family were well off enough to frequently travel overseas in the ’60s and ’70s when that was a far-off luxury for most working-class families. Little Albo, likewise, wouldn’t know a blue-collar job if it hit him in the face.

The parliamentary Labor party today numbers not a single former worker in its ranks. It’s wall-to-wall arts graduates who went straight from university to politics – with, at best, a union office job in between.

And, boy, does it show.

Middle Australia is not only paying the price of the inflation problem through higher interest rates, it is now also doing the heavy lifting to repair the federal government’s balance sheet.

Jim “Zippy the Pinhead” Chalmers might brag about delivering a second unexpected budget surplus, but two caveats are in order: the surpluses are absolutely unexpected windfalls, courtesy of a surge in Chinese demand for Australian iron ore and global demand for natural gas. Secondly, when the Howard government delivered surplus after surplus, it not only paid down debt, it paid back middle Australia with tax cuts.

In typical Labor fashion, Chalmers is taxing us until the pips squeak. Not the wealthy, of course: for all their braggadocious blatherskite about ‘tax the rich’, Labor aren’t stupid enough to hit their best friends in the hip pockets. Instead, it’s the middle class – the lifters of Australia – who are being wrung dry.

While most households are acutely aware of how much more they are paying for things, particularly their mortgages, they may be less aware of how much more tax they are paying now as well.

Wednesday’s mid-year Economic and Fiscal outlook reveals the fastest growing piece of the revenue pie is the income tax take.

And it’s being siphoned from the pockets of the people who work for a living.

There are three groups wearing the pain of the economic problem and the budget problem.

The first are wage earners who are paying more for things.

The second are borrowers who are paying more through higher interest rates.

And the third are taxpayers who are paying more tax – the price of bracket creep.

Middle Australia falls into all three categories.

The Australian

And when Australians file their tax returns, next June, if the government still publishes the handy pie chart showing where the tax money goes, they’ll notice that the gigantic blue wedge labelled “welfare”, already the biggest slice of the pie, is more gargantuan than ever.

Labor is jacking up the price of everything so comprehensively, we won’t even be able to afford to flee the country.

The Australian passport is already one of the most expensive in the world but will go up in price twice in 2024 […]

An adult passport currently costs $325 over 10 years.

It’s expected the second increase will add an additional $50 to the price – on top of the additional cost applied on January 1.

The Australian

At least we’re not having to eat our pets.

Yet.