The Liberal Party is spiralling into irrelevance. Labor and the Greens are not connecting the dots. The Nationals are looking after their own as they always do. So maybe the Teals can connect the big policy dots that stand before us: health, education, childcare, tax, immigration, and rorts.
And underlying those six Big Ticket Items are two more Big Ticket Items: gender fairness and intergenerational fairness.
These things seem to have come to a head in the past few weeks with the exposure of teacher and GP shortages as stressed teachers and GPs abandon their vocation and fewer are minded to replace them. At the same time the Government refuses to abandon the Stage 3 tax cuts and adds to the misery by yet again kow-towing to business by signalling a large increase in immigration.
Who is going to ensure there are enough teachers and doctors for the immigrants and their children? Can’t be done.
And right now, with a change of government and helter-skelter economic upheaval, Australia must move beyond the business-driven, Murdoch-supported model. That model was: cut taxes; impose austerity on the weakest; import cheap labour that can be exploited; and be damned to the environment.
Connect the dots. ATO figures this month revealed that 60 people (all men, demographics would suggest) had gross incomes of more than $1 million (average $3.5 million) yet paid no tax.
No doubt the 60 no-tax millionaires have the highest private health cover and send their kids to private schools so they are not troubled by this.
The dot-connecting insight is that these manipulators paid no Medicare levy and probably have Commonwealth health cards. The link between stressed public health and public education, on one hand, and low tax for the wealthy and high immigration is obvious.
If Labor is bent on retaining the Coalition’s high immigration; low-tax for the wealthy; pro-big business policies as if the 21 May vote did not happen, some pressure must come from elsewhere. And who better than the Teals?
Treasure Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese go into uncharacteristic illogical circumlocution when asked whether the Stage Three cuts will go ahead. Their only argument seems to be that they have already been legislated.
Well, surely, they can be unlegislated. After all, they do not come in for at least 10 months, so no-one can argue they have relied on them, unlike the poor sods who relied on Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe’s prediction that interest rates would not rise until 2024.
The Teals should take up the tax cause for several reasons. First, the cuts massively favour males, who will on average get twice as much as females. Second, they massively favour the wealthy. The bottom 20 per cent get nothing and the top 20 per cent get 72 per cent of the cut. Those in the middle will not get enough to keep pace with inflation. The sweet spot is for those struggling on $200,000 a year, who will get a $9,200 tax cut.
Third, over the next decade they will cost $184 billion. It would be the fiscally responsible thing for the Teals to introduce the repealing legislation, to expose Labor’s true colours. It would also meet their electoral commitments to a better deal for women. The $184 billion will come out of public health and education and childcare – issue which tend to affect women more than men.
Fourth, the change in economic circumstances – shortages and inflation – justify a change in tax policy. These tax cuts may have been legislated, but they were legislated before covid struck.
Covid has changed nearly everything. It certainly should change our view on immigration. As covid struck, the economic experts predicted that unemployment would hit up to 15 per cent. But with the borders closed and no immigration, unemployment sank to a 30-year low.
That lesson should ink in and it is one over which the Teals should exert their legislative influence. At present the immigration level is set by the Minister for Immigration and the Parliament gets no say. The Minister may consult colleagues and business but clearly has not taken any heed of the mass opinion of voters who are fed up with congestion; infrastructure stress; hospital queues and environmental stress.
Perhaps the Teals could introduce legislation that requires parliamentary approval of the Minister’s decision. Or at least make the decision disallowable by either House, as with a lot of minister-made regulation.
Coincidentally in the past week, rampant rorts have been uncovered in the National Disability Insurance scheme and in the program to help flood victims.
Surely, we should recognise that every government program is susceptible to rorting and that effective self-regulation is an oxymoron.
And there has been no bigger systemic rorting of a government program in the past 20 years than the immigration program.
All the benefits of cheap labour went to business while the cost has been shouldered by the environment and ordinary people (including recent migrants) who pay through stressed schools, hospitals, roads and housing.
The so-called dire skills shortage would be better addressed by free childcare to tap into the female talent pool and boosting training in Australia.
And a skills shortage has an upside. In the past year we have seen signs everywhere asking for workers in retail and hospitality. It means work is available for people who want it, especially in areas where people can be fairly quickly and cheaply trained. There is no need to bring these people in from elsewhere.
As to the case for more highly skilled migrants, it must be weighed against the morality of stealing skills from countries where they are more desperately needed than in Australia.
Most other developed countries do not have massive immigration schemes. Australia has one because it once needed one and we have always had one ever since and business gets short-term benefits from it at a much greater long-term broader cost.
But it has passed its use-by date, as have tax cuts for the wealthy; squeezing public health and education; denying women free universal child care; and self-regulation.
Crispin Hull
This article was first published in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 16 August 2022.
Jack Frisch makes some important observations but it is important he understand that the shortages he identifies are more likely to be exacerbated rather than resolved by immigration. As people have noted, we have grown our population by 7 million in 22 years and business still claim shortages and scarcity!
Immigration, esp. in the volumes proposed creates demand which produces scarcity.
As for OS doctors,and nurses and aged care workers, bringing them in has always been morally reprehensible. Invariably, these are drawn from populations where their ratio to patients, clients, etc, is far, far lower. Bringing health professionals from India, China, Nigeria, Philippines etc is unforgivable. Yet our politicians do this with not a moment’s thought.
Why has no one mentioned why we have labour shortages in critical areas like health, aged care, etc. Maybe, just maybe, it is because we now outsource so many tasks such as house cleaning, lawn mowing, gardening, laundry/ironing, eating out/take-away food, food delivery, etc, all of which are taking potential workers away from other jobs. Increasing immigration will not solve any problems as these people will simply be part of the older generation in a few years. If businesses don’t have enough skilled staff, perhaps they should start training their own. We need to stop pandering to the better off (am I’m one of them) and make us pay more towards aged care, etc (the current lifetime means tested fee of under $70,000 is simply way too low).
Stage 3 tax cuts should go as should the the increase in the CSHCC limit for over $140,000 for couples, along with this idea that childcare should be free (yes, subsidised for those who really need it, but surely families on incomes more than about 140% of average do not need it – it is really just subsidising their life-style).
Everyone talks about shortages in retail and hospitality as if we should really care about the sectors that by and large are for entertainment and pander to the entitled wealthy and middle classes. The shortages we should care about are the shortages of personal care attendants in disability and aged care and the nurses in public hospital; the shortages of teachers and doctors who service the lower end of the income spectrum and people living in unserviced regional Australia. Replace trickle-down Economics with trickle-up Economics.
I will be a winner from the Stage 3 tax cuts, but my three daughters will be losers because they chose local personal service professions instead of pandering to the rich – despite HSC results that could have got them into any faculty they wanted. What fools my wife and I were to bring them up to care!
Well put Mr Hull, the Teals have a chance to end the ponzy scheme of high immigration..Will not high migration add to the existing housing shortage , public hospital waiting and school over crowding? .We used to have the Colombo scheme to educate neighbours kids. Some how Unis have been turned into revenue raises,and growth is pursued at the cost of anything. Teals and the Greens have chance to help reset our goals as a nation .
Another fine analytical piece.
With regards to the Teals, I am perhaps less hopeful than you appear to be. I have done my best to get them thinking about what is, to my mind, the true Big Ticket issue (because it encompasses and overwhelms all else): our immigration-fed forever growth economic model. I am not seeing evidence that our Teals are keen to engage with the immigration/GROWTH issue and that has been most disappointing.
The opportunity to do so arose when Ms Plibersek released the latest State of the Environment report. This made very clear that our on-going (and apparently never-ending) population growth is a/the major driver of our environmental decline and that this decline will continue unless our growth is addressed.
Instead, most Teals maintained — and thereby were complicit in — the great lie; that all our environmental woes were a product of Climate Change (and that Labor and the Teals were finally doing something about it). Rubbish, of course!
At least one of the Zees is an unrepentant growthist (and has endorsed high immigration); so we can expect no sense from her. The other seems not yet to have made up her mind. As for the rest, it is unclear if they will get a grip on the issues that will make a real difference; although we might expect all to oppose Labor’s determination to advance with the tax cuts.
But nothing really matters if we do not, once and for all, address the unmitigated folly of our population-fed forever-growth economic model. Ever more people consuming ever more will so self-evidently invite environmental disaster, it beggars belief that anyone, anywhere, would choose to support it!
The stage 3 tax cuts were first announced in the 2018 budget in which the final outcome of 2018-19 was a low $0.7 billion deficit (0% of GDP) and net debt was $373.6 billion (19.1% of GDP).
On 31 May 2018 Treasurer Morrison said “when we came to government we had to deal with the economic and fiscal catastrophe that was left to us by those who sit on that side of the House now”. 27 June 2018 Treasurer Morrison said “We have wrestled Labor’s gorilla of debt to the ground”. Treasurer Frydenberg 11 Feb 2020 “When we came to government, we inherited a budget deficit of $48½ billion: around three per cent of GDP. We have now banked a balanced budget. Could you imagine responding to the challenges we face, with the fires, the virus, the floods, the drought and the ongoing trade tensions between the US and China, with a $48½ billion (3% of GDP) deficit? WE WOULD HAVE HAD TO PUT UP TAXES” That was the 2013-14 budget year when net debt was 13.1% of GDP
Fast forward to 2019-20 deficit of 4.3% of GDP and net debt 24.7% of GDP. 2020-21 deficit 6.5% of GDP, net debt 28.6% of GDP. 2021-22 deficit is expected to be between $30-40 billion with even higher net debt.
SMH’s Shane Wright wrote The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated in 2022 the cost of the stage 3 had blown out to $206.6 billion over its 1st 8 years. The PBO costing was done for Adam Bandt Greens Leader. Adam Bandt has been quoting $220 billion. All of this tax cuts will be funded by additional government borrowing – The Treasury April 2022 PEFO (digital page 20) stated ” Medium-term fiscal outlook: The underlying cash balance is projected to improve over the medium term to a DEFICIT of 0.7 per cent of GDP in 2032-33″
https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-04/pefo-2022.pdf#:~:text=Overview%20Consistent%20with%20the%20Charter%2C%20the%202022%20PEFO,time%20of%20the%20issue%20of%20the%20election%20writs.
There is absolutely no doubt that stage 3 is unaffordable, reckless, irresponsible, conservative ideological, and will unfairly gift the highest incomes $9,075 compared to middle income on $87,000 a $1050 tax cut. Even former LNP Treasurers Morrison and Frydenberg, by their question time comments noted above, advised their side, that in the current fiscal, situation the government should be focused on reducing debt and deficit.