En Passant

As a former Assistant Commissioner of Taxation it seems clear to me that the current Commissioner of Taxation has failed in his duty to protect ordinary workers. I call on him, and the gaggle of executives he has gathered around him who are currently destroying the ATO, to resign immediately.

After sacking 4500 tax officers, the Commissioner of Taxation now doesn’t have enough staff to police employer compliance with superannuation laws. The bosses are ripping off $3.6 bn every year from 2.4 million workers. The Commissioner of Taxation and the gaggle of his executives destroying the Tax Office should resign.

While we are splitting hairs arguing over which worker is slightly richer than other workers, and admiring the government for its sleight of hand in giving a few crumbs to a few pensioners, the rich are laughing all the way to their tax free superannuation bank. And it is not just superannuation. As ACOSS has revealed in its report Inequality in Australia: A nation divided, inequality continues to increase in Australia. As the report says ‘a person in the top 20% wealth group has around 70 times more wealth than a person in the bottom 20%.’ The main winners out of this winner/loser strategy are the Abbott Government and the really rich. The government will use the same divisive model again. Public school fees anyone?

In their eagerness to prove their ‘realistic and pragmatic’ credentials the Greens have been sold a pension pup that attacks retired workers but leaves the superannuation of the rich untouched.

The top ten percent of income earners receive about one third of all the superannuation tax concessions, that is about $15 billion worth of tax expenditures annually. A couple in a similar position to the Arguses, if they stay within the rules, will get payments totaling $1.2 million per year tax free. Far better to slug poor and sick people between $5 and $20 to go to the doctor or put the GST on fresh food than to tax the rich eh Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey? So tell me again about the end of the age of entitlement.

A government committed to women re-entering the workforce could set up a program for state owned and operated (with parent participation) childcare centres at affordable rates in working class areas across Australia.

The wages of early childcare workers remain low, (Page 26), so a progressive government would also increase the pay of these workers markedly.

Let’s be clear here. Australia’s budget deficit is around ten percent of GDP, a very modest amount compared to other developed countries, and half of it a consequence of Abbott government decisions. Australia is a low tax and a low spending country. If we moved to the average tax rate of OECD countries we’d raise about an extra $100 billion a year. It is time not just to chant tax the rich but to mobilise around it as part of a wider push for socially progressive policies on jobs, the environment, indigenous Australians, asylum seekers, gays and lesbians, public health, public education, public transport, disability, pensions, child care and the like.

Australia would be better off if workers would die sooner. That seems to be the consensus of the country’s elite, writes Kim Doyle in Red Flag. But two reports released in November concluded that, given that older Australians can’t simply be killed off, the solution to the “problem” of increased life expectancy is for most of us to work harder and longer.

They are waging class war against us. The Productivity Commission pension recommendations are just one part of that war.

Isn’t it time we fought back instead of turning the other cheek and being smashed by the bosses and their politicians in both major parties every bloody day?

They are burning us out. Instead of increasing the pension age, cut it to 60.

The time for a 30 hour week is now.  The time for taxing the rich is now.

The time for fighting back is now.

Priorities eh? Scrap the school kids bonus and increase the superannuation tax on those people earning less than $37000 while at the same time saving multi-millionaire superannuants about $20,000 in tax a year and multinational companies $600 million a year. Class war anyone?