Chalmers gives $3m super tax election mandate status
With just over a month before Parliament resumes sittings, the Federal Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is reinforcing that the Government believes it has a mandate to deliver its $3 million superannuation tax cap legislation without significant amendment.
Indeed, in the run-up to the first sittings in the Senate indexation appears to be the only concession the Government might give, and even that seems increasingly unlikely.
While the Treasurer was last week acknowledging the need for “respectful” negotiations with the Australian Greens around the policy, he emphasised that it had been on foot for two years.
And even though the policy did not become a major election issue notwithstanding the taxation of unrealised capital gains, Chalmers made clear he believes the scale of the Australian Labor Party’s May election win has delivered it a mandate.
Discussing the issue, Chalmers acknowledged the need for Greens support but signalled the Government was focused on keeping its policy substantially intact.
Referencing the Greens’ policy involving lowering the threshold to $2 million and applying indexation, the Treasurer appeared unmoved.
“… in terms of the proposals they’ve put on the table, our preference and our expectation is that we legislate what we took to the people and what we announced more than two years ago,” Chalmers said.
“But I will respectfully engage with the Greens and with others in the Senate to pass this legislation. We did announce this policy almost two and a half years ago. There has been an election in between, and we’ll have the necessary conversations to try and see it passed,” he said.
“Mandates” are for policy intent, not dodgy implementation design.
Chalmers has every right to increase tax on excessive amounts of super. But he needs to do it in a sensible, practical way. Not via the sh!t sandwich he is trying to force feed Australians.
There may have been an election in place but every time I mentioned this pre-election on ‘X’ I got shot down by Labour supporters who claimed:
1) I was lying and it didn’t exist
2) that My modest calculations were incorrect that in 25 years time the average retiring Aussie would be impacted with the percentage impacted growing annually.
3) That future governments would just randomly increase the number the keep those affected to 1.5% of super annuitants.
4) That farmers who owned farms in super should pay the tax because they’re rich (not sure where they were to get the funds from; the cost of the annual valuations…
5) that those affected by the ‘gains’ could offset these against losses…
6) That those who had balances of $3m had somehow paid no tax on these amounts (when they’d probably been paying 30% contributions tax…)
There were many more asinine responses. It was clear they had no concept of how this was going to work…just like Tony and Jim….
“Recent budget papers showed a collapse in tobacco excise to $7.1bn, which is around half of the tax take five years ago. There is a shortfall of nearly $18bn in tax take over the next four years.”
If you want to raise revenue Jim, why don’t you start here champ?
There’s two vendors within a 5-iron of my office that sell illegal smokes but instead here we are messing about with taxing unrealised capital gains.
Absolute muppets.