Election 2016: Coalition's corporate tax cuts to cost $3b more than flagged, PBO analysis shows
Updated
The Coalition's 10-year corporate tax cut plan will cost about $3 billion more than flagged by the Government, according to analysis by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO).
The PBO has investigated the Coalition's proposal to progressively lower the business tax rate to 25 per cent by 2026-27.
Treasury secretary John Fraser last month told a Senate hearing two key measures would cost $48.2 billion over the medium term.
But the PBO costing — commissioned by the Greens — put the cost of the same measures at $51.1 billion.
"This report is a death blow to any argument that giving a tax cut to big business is affordable, it's just not," Greens treasury spokesman Adam Bandt said.
"The cost keeps going up and up and up and that's money that's not there for schools and not there for hospitals.
"It's going to cost us more than the Government has suggested and any argument that somehow now we can afford tax cuts for big business has just gone out the window."
The PBO said the costings were considered to be "low to medium reliability" over the four-year forward estimates period, and said the reliability decreased over time after that.
Topics: federal-elections, federal-government, government-and-politics, tax, budget, australia
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