Coalition plans return to Costello-era fiscal rules

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor says the Coalition will propose to re-establish fiscal rules that ensure federal government spending growth does not outpace economic growth at an unsustainable rate.

Taylor said the Coalition intended to re-adopt these fiscal rules, which were first put in place by former Liberal treasurer Peter Costello in the late 1990s, in response to an increase in government spending over the past two years.

“They’re rules that ensure that government, when they’re putting together their budgets, have a process where they do exercise restraint,” he told ABC’s Insiders.

“That’s not what we’ve been seeing … We’re proposing to put those back in.

“This is a very important policy change. Labor took them out when they came into government.”

Taylor added that these rules would help the government generate a longer term structural budget balance rather than the shorter term windfall surplus that Labor was aiming to achieve.

Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor says Australians will pay a high price if the fiscal policies contained in the Albanese government’s next federal budget fail to cool inflation.

Taylor says reducing inflation should the key objective of Labor’s third budget, which it will unveil on Tuesday night.

“To do that, they have to re-establish the fiscal rules that Peter Costello put in place back in the 1990s to have a structural budget balance, making sure the economy grows faster than spending,” he said on ABC’s Insiders.

Costello, who is chairman of Nine, publisher of The Australian Financial Review, was federal treasurer from 1996 to 2007.

Taylor said Labor’s previous two budgets had failed to reduce inflation.

“They haven’t delivered this cut in inflation, the home-grown inflation that we’ve seen under Labor – described as home-grown inflation by the Reserve Bank governor by the way – and the result is, if we have another flop in this budget, Australians will pay a high price.”

The shadow treasurer then accused the government of $209 billion in additional spending since it came to power two years ago.

“That’s over $20,000 for every Australian household. I bet there are not many Australian households out there listening to this who feel as though they’ve got that benefit. That’s what they’ve done.”

Liberal Senator Jane Hume has condemned the Albanese government’s decision to support a Palestinian bid to become a full United Nations member.

Australia broke with the United States on Friday (Saturday AEST) and voted with the majority of the UN General Assembly on a resolution to grant “rights and privileges” to Palestine, saying it no longer accepted that recognition can only come at the end of a peace process.

Hume said by voting in favour of the resolution, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had rewarded Hamas, an organisation that Australian security officials had designated as a terrorist group.

“They’ve done so without reference to Israel, who is an ally of Australia,” she said on Sky News.

“There can be no sustainable two-state solution without the consent of Israel, and without an acknowledgement that both sides have a right to exist peacefully alongside each other.

“That simply is impossible right now, particularly while Hamas still has hundreds of hostages from Israel within its borders and hasn’t returned them.

“This is a significant shift in Australian foreign policy, and we are very disappointed that the Labor government has decided to go the way of … rewarding a terrorist organisation rather than dealing with this crisis through the means of diplomacy and negotiation.”

Shadow finance spokeswoman Jane Hume says the Coalition will unveil a new income tax policy before the next election that seeks to restore balance in the system after Labor abolished its final stage of tax cuts.

Hume said the Coalition’s tax reforms would be based on the opposition’s commitment to supporting lower, simpler and fairer taxes for businesses and households, and protecting Australians’ incomes from bracket creep.

“I’m not going to announce tax policy on your show today. I don’t want to pre-empt that. But what I will say is that you will see tax policy from the Coalition at the next election that restores the balance,” Hume said on Sky News.

Hume said the Coalition’s income tax reforms would not be about restoring the stage three tax cuts as they previously were.

“They’ve been trashed by this government that is clearly genuinely timid of tax reform that would get rid of that insidious bracket creep,” she said.

“So we will come out with a tax policy well before the next election.”

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has flagged its third federal budget will include “substantial” cost-of-living relief for Australians in addition to changes to the stage three income tax cuts.

Chalmers said the budget, which he will hand down on Tuesday night, will allow the Albanese government to provide Australians with cost-of-living relief while at the same time invest in the future of the economy.

“Now it’s a responsible budget. It will be good for us, for middle Australia, good for families, and it will recognise the pressures that people are under,” he said on Sky News.

“The cost-of-living relief in this budget won’t be identical to what we’ve seen in the past, but it will be substantial, and it will be in addition to the tax cuts for every taxpayer.”

He said the relief would be designed in a way that would take “the edge off inflation rather than adding to it”.

“If you think about that electricity bill relief in the year to March, electricity bills would have gone up almost 15 per cent, if we hadn’t acted – instead they went up 2 per cent.”

Shadow finance spokeswoman Jane Hume has urged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to hand down a budget that restores the fiscal guardrails that previous government had established.

Ahead of Chalmers handing down the Albanese government’s third budget on Tuesday, Hume she and some economists were concerned that “after two years of wrong priorities and failed policies of the Albanese-Labor government, Australians are paying the price”.

“We cannot afford to have the wrong budget brought down again,” she said on Sky News.

“Unless [Treasurer] Jim Chalmers on Tuesday night presents a budget that restores the fiscal guardrails that we’ve seen in previous Coalition and Labor budgets, and makes sure that there is a structural surplus not just a windfall surplus in that medium term … then this government will have failed in its duty.”

She said Labor also needed to ensure inflation was returned to its target range, to restore living standards by lowering energy prices and to focus on small business, as well as large companies.

Hume added that the Albanese government had spent an additional $209 billion over the past two years, driving aggregate demand in the economy and putting upward pressure on inflation.

“Unless you bring inflation back under control, well, then the cost of living will continue to rise and Australians will pay the price.”

NSW is being urged to follow an apology to people convicted under laws criminalising homosexuality with more action targeting discrimination.

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of decriminalising homosexuality, NSW will become the last Australian state to issue an apology in a move the premier hopes will bring closure to those affected.

The apology will come months after a scathing report found gay hate bias was a likely factor in 25 of 32 suspected homicides between 1970 and 2010.

Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown said the “powerful symbolic act” was an opportunity to address discrimination still being experienced.

NSW parliament is currently considering a bill – led by Independent MP Alex Greenwich – designed to protect the rights of people within the queer community.

“These unjust criminal laws created a climate of fear and prejudice that, 40 years on, our community still grapples with today and sadly, our laws continue to entrench discrimination that casts a shadow over the lives of LGBTIQ+ people,” Brown said in a statement.

“As NSW comes to grips with this painful chapter in our history there is no better time for the government to catch up with the rest of Australia and remove the remaining discrimination under our laws, so everyone is protected and treated fairly.”

Announcing the apology on Saturday, NSW Premier Chris Minns acknowledged words can’t remedy the discrimination those affected were subject to.

“But I hope that it brings some semblance of closure to those that were unfairly targeted by laws of the day that criminalised gay and lesbian people for being who they are,” he said in a statement.

Last year’s inquiry into suspected hate crimes made 12 recommendations about unsolved murder investigations, including calling for a review of practices, procedures and resources.

Thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Saturday (Sunday AEST) demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government do more to secure the release of hostages being held in the Gaza Strip by Islamist group Hamas.

Family members of the hostages, carrying pictures of their loved ones still in captivity, joined the crowds that demonstrated in Tel Aviv.

One of them was Naama Weinberg, whose cousin Itai Svirsky was abducted during Hamas’ October 7 assault on Israeli towns and, according to Israeli authorities, was killed in captivity. In a speech, she referenced a video Hamas made public on Saturday, claiming that another of the Israeli captives had died.

“Soon, even those who managed to survive this long will no longer be among the living. They must be saved now,” Weinberg said.

As the evening progressed, some protesters blocked a main highway in the city before being dispersed by police, who used water cannons to push back the crowd. At least three people were arrested.

Hamas’ October 7 attack sparked the devastating war in Gaza, now raging for nearly seven months.

Former US president Donald Trump used a dubious accounting manoeuvre to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a years-long audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $US100 million ($151 million).

The 92-storey, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.

But when Mr Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and, in effect, wrote off the same losses twice.

The first write-off came on Mr Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr Trump’s reporting losses as high as $US651 million for the year, the Times and ProPublica found.

There is no indication that the IRS challenged that initial claim, although that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Mr Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a manoeuvre that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $US168 million in additional losses over the next decade.

The issues around Mr Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. The Times and ProPublica, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $US100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.

Mr Trump’s tax records have been a matter of intense speculation since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he defied decades of precedent and refused to release his returns, citing a long-running audit. A first, partial revelation of the substance of the audit came in 2020, when the Times reported that the IRS was disputing a $US72.9 million tax refund that Mr Trump had claimed starting in 2010. That refund, which appeared to be based on Mr Trump’s reporting of vast losses from his long-failing casinos, equalled every dollar of federal income tax he had paid during his first flush of television riches, from 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

The reporting by the Times and ProPublica about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Mr Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney-general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting manoeuvre. The memorandum did not identify Mr Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.