Tax and spend, tax and spend, inflation, housing crisis, uncontrolled mass immigration, tax and spend, cost of living crisis and rampant anti-Semitism on the march. Oh, did I mention and tax and spend?
Tell me this isn’t a Labor government.
During the last election campaign, Anthony Albanese promised nearly 100 times to slash household power bills. That promise manifestly failed to materialise. A last-ditch ‘reduction’ in prices neither brings prices back below what they were pre-Albanese. They’re almost entirely the result of ‘rebates’: that is, churning a small fraction of taxpayers’ money back to them.
A sharp reduction in household power bills due to government energy rebates drove inflation in August to its lowest level in three years, however the temporary decline is set to be ignored by the Reserve Bank.
That’s because underlying inflation is still well over three per cent, and it’s being continually amplified by government spending.
After Western Australians and Queenslanders had their power bills slashed in July, the remaining households across the country received a $75 energy bill rebate in August, causing electricity prices to fall by 17.9 per cent, the ABS said.
Woo, $75! Don’t spend it all on one bag of groceries. Note, too, that that hasn’t actually reduced wholesale power prices. It’s just a government pre-election sweetener, paid for by the very taxpayers who are paying through the nose for electricity. Labor is a con-man who has stolen our wallets and generously loaned us a $20 to get us by.
Once that runs out, we’re flat on our arses again.
According to staff forecasts released by RBA in August, headline inflation is expected to enter its target band before year’s end before shooting back up to 3.7 per cent 12 months later once government support expires.
And the spectre of yet more crippling rate rises continues to hang over voters’ heads.
After holding the cash rate steady at 4.35 per cent on Tuesday and again ruling out rate cuts before Christmas, RBA governor Michele Bullock said the central bank would look through Wednesday’s figures and warned that progress on reducing underlying inflation had slowed.
“The point I would make is that if tomorrow we get an inflation number with a two in front of it, so it’s back in the band, that doesn’t mean that we’ve got inflation under control,” Ms Bullock said.
“It doesn’t mean that inflation is sustainably back within the band,” Ms Bullock said.
That’s the spend. Now comes the tax.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has left the door open to Labor revisiting changes to negative gearing.
Mr Albanese was asked to respond to reports in Nine newspapers that the government had commissioned Treasury modelling on possible changes to the tax arrangements for investment properties.
Labor took such a policy to the 2019 federal election, which it lost, and the prime minister hosed down the prospect of revisiting the idea as recently as last week, when he scoffed at questions on the subject in an ABC interview.
In other words, they absolutely are about to slug landlords. Gee, that’ll really help with the housing crisis.
Coalition finance spokesperson Jane Hume said the Coalition would oppose any negative gearing change that would “reduce supply [and] push up rents,” something she argued would result from a significant winding back of the tax concession.
“When you remove those tax incentives… investors leave the system so that we have fewer rental properties. And those that stay in the system push their rents up so that they can compensate for the loss of that tax incentive,” she told the ABC’s News Breakfast on Wednesday […]
A large proportion of those who negatively gear have only one property – a group sometimes referred to as “mum and dad investors” – but a significant proportion of the properties that are negatively geared are owned by a smaller group of investors with large property portfolios.
The Greens have framed negative gearing changes as a measure to address the housing crisis, although analysis by the Grattan Institute has previously found that the effect on house prices of any change that exempted current negatively-geared properties would be small.
If, as seems likely at the moment, Australia ends up with a hung parliament, we can bet that Albanese will bend over backwards to give the Greens what they want. And what the far-left Greens love more than anything is tax, tax, tax.
The Greens have issued several housing-related demands in exchange for their support on those bills, including calling for negative gearing and capital gains tax changes.
Even without the Greens cracking the whip, Labor are slavishly addicted to policies which will only exacerbate the housing crisis: increased immigration and rent caps.
Did anyone really expect any different when they elected this incompetent rabble?
