It’s time to rebuild our great nation they cry. But has the plutocracy already won? Michael West reports on reform stagnation.
“We’ve wasted 20 years. It’s time to rebuild our great nation” proclaimed Peter Costello in The Australian today.
“Our country is still better than most,” said the former Liberal treasurer, “But it could have been so much better still. To recover things, we need first to understand what happened.”
Well, we know what happened. You blew it. Here’s the chart.
You guys waived the CGT discount, which turbocharged negative gearing and – combining with an explosion of foreign capital into Australia’s residential property markets – you blew up the Aussie home ownership dream. That’s what happened.
Some 17 years of dithering on money-laundering reform didn’t help. You got the rich into this mansion flipping craze caper while the immense revenues from the China boom were blithely squandered. You listened to the lobbyists.
But to be fair, Labor went along for the ride. You guys from the Coalition just happened to be in government most of the time. And, it wasn’t just the fabulous property lurks which detonated equality in Australia. It was your array of tax breaks on superannuation which turned ‘retirement income’ into a gigantic tax shelter.
Not to mention the bipartisan abject failure on gas and resources taxes which still sees Australia pillaged by multinationals.
High-end secrecy and money-laundering is dragging the property market higher
So now, the very voters who kept you in power with all those hand-outs are dying off and Australia is about to undergo a massive transfer of wealth. The probate courts are choked with contested wills and estates cases. This is the biggest wealth bonanza in history, the one you created,
for some.
Yet we mustn’t complain. It’s now time to reform! And now that Treasurer Jim Chalmers has put CGT relief on the table for debate – just one of the many lurks of the Boomers’ Boom, you – Rupert Murdoch and co – are now making this “dire warning” about tax hikes on young Australians to pay for “Labor’s unsustainable largesse”.
Even the plutocrats
Yes, things are that bad, that urgent, that even the pro-plutocratic AFR is now campaigning. “Bill Kelty is right. It’s time for CGT and intergenerational reform”.
Such is the magnitude of the problem you have all created that the Pauline Hanson protest vote has gone through the roof and the future of the Liberal Party hangs by a thread.
But is the answer too hard?
So reform it is! Reform all round! We know the answer. It’s reform. Every single time however there is any effort to reform it is shot down by lobbyists and vested interests. By the very people who pay your political party donations.
Chalmers’ recent reform foray; a move to take a little froth off the top of an extremely generous super scheme for the rich, delivered virtual nothingness .. after all the howls, the blood-curdling crocodile tears.
Same deal when Bill Shorten took franking credit reform to the ‘unloseable’ election against Scomo. Shot down in a fear campaign by Murdoch and Nine.
The sad fact is that politicians just cannot stand up to corporate lobbyists, even worse, corporate lobbyists have taken over.
Negative gearing, which just leverages the economy in favour of the banks and the wealthy, is not even on the table, let alone any meaningful resources or wealth tax.
The answer is blindingly obvious:
tax wealth not income,
tax multinationals who are pillaging Australia, not ordinary working Australians. Yet the political will is not available.
Monique Ryan hit the nail on the head. “Politicians are outnumbered by lobbyists in Parliament House 15 to one; on sitting days hundreds of lobbyists roam the halls in Canberra, meeting with Ministers to influence government policies.” 15 to 1.
Government of consultants
Former KPMG partner Brendan Lyon took it further with his explanation of the “CAANZ scam“. The Big 4 said Lyon were basically writing the laws of the nation. Government policy had been outsourced to consultants: chiefly PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY.
The paradox is these Big 4 don’t even consider themselves to be lobbyists. Yet they have inserted themselves into government. The problem here is, as Lyons points out, the allegiance of the Big 4 is with their big multinational clients, the tax and audit clients whose interests are the exact opposite of the interests of ordinary Australians.
Their interests are not equality or fairness or reform for average Australians, or small business, or housing. Their interests are in maximising profits for foreign corporations. Their interests are in perpetuating the regime which has made their partners rich: neoliberalism, privatisation, corporate tax avoidance, high immigration to feed labour demand.
Moreover, the CAANZ scam illustrates that there is no accountability in government because the Big 4 consultants reap handsome profits regardless of outcomes. No public servant is responsible either for the actions of a government because they have privatised their responsibility.
No accountability means no performance.
So it is that corporatocracy has been entrenched, just as we feared ten years ago when we began this independent media caper with this story Oligarchs of the Treasure Islands.
It had begun already by then. Two years before, under the prime ministership of Tony Abbott, the Big 4 government consulting fees were beginning to double. Now the figures for federal consulting fees alone are approaching $7B a year.
And since then, we have seen the PwC scandal prove precisely this point. Although the Big 4 firm was working on ‘tax reform’ for the government it was selling its tax secrets to its foreign multinational clients who interests were the diametrical opposite to the interests of ordinary Australians.
And after a slap on the wrist they are back in full swing ‘doing government’
Pundits often reminisce about the Hawke Keating reform years as if we can just invoke another great reform period. The problem is the system.
The problem with PWC and the Big 4 – treason is the business model