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How about trying to report differently on budgets and taxes?
There are only five weeks left until the budget and the usual lists of winners and losers.
Last year's winners were said to be single parents, renters and first home buyers. Among the losers were said to be steamers, trucks and consultants.
It's also how we talk about taxes: winners and losers.
On Budget night, when the Phase 3 tax cut changes are re-announced, we will be told that they will Australians earn less than $146,000 better than they would have been, and Australians who earn more than that are worse off.
It's terribly predictable, but it's even worse than that.
It's part of a way of thinking and reporting that makes changes that might actually help us all, but impossible.
Making this point passionately in Canberra last week (and apologizing for his role in it) was Ken Henry, the government's chief economic adviser as head of the treasury between 2001 and 2011, and head of the Henry Tax Review in 2009 .
Tales of a hired gun
Here is Henry's account. Shortly after he joined the Treasury as a tax expert at the head of the 1985 tax summit convened by Treasurer Paul Keating and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, he was taken aside by his Treasury bosses and told that the arguments for making Australia more good they wouldn't fly.
His bosses told him:
all anyone would want to know is what was in it for them, how many dollars would they get, and that's all the newspapers would want to know, that's what they'd print on their front pages.
What would matter would be instant “overnight” assessments of who would win and who would lose. Beyond not costing the government money, nothing else would matter, not even how the changes would affect society by getting people to do some things and not others, rather than what they would do over time for the people who won or lost that night.
So, apparently with a heavy heart, Henry developed a computer model that spit out nothing more than immediate winners and losers and ignored what the changes would do to Australia in the longer term.
Winners and losers are (almost) beside the point
Henry says that looking back it's easy to understand “why we did what we did”.
“But I can't escape the feeling that, in developing the tools that facilitated squabbles over the distribution of profits and losses among Australia's families in 1985, we were participating in a conspiracy against future Australian families.”
Henry did it again in 1991, helping to build a much more accurate version of the model, the exaggerated accuracy of which was used by Keating as Prime Minister to assassinate Opposition Leader John Hewson. plan for a series of tax changes including a 15 percent goods and services tax and ending Hewson's political career.
But this bothered Henry. He says the Hewson package was a genuine attempt to get out of the winner-and-loser mindset and argue for change on the basis that it would benefit society.
Then, in the late 1990s, Henry dusted off the model again and used it in reverse to help the Howard government get the 10 per cent GST.
“A Plot Against Future Australians”
Henry's accounts tell us of more than the flexibility needed to serve the government of the day. They tell us that the thing that matters most, to make Australia work better, can't really be talked about.
And the more it's not talked about, the more people are told what's in it for them, the harder it is to change.
Here's what Henry says really matters, and what he says he tried to address in his 2009 tax overhaul.
The things we should not celebrate, and should punish severely, are looting, dumb luck and a “finders keeper” approach to resources, including mineral resources.
The things we should avoid taxing are income from work, normal rates of return for businesses and transactions. They are the things we need most to build our standards of living.
We need fewer taxes on wages and ordinary earnings, and more on unreasonably large profits, windfall capital gains, wealth, and the use of land and natural resources.
By easily taxing the things they take from the rest of us (such as super profits earned by companies with a kind of monopoly) and by taxing heavily the things they give to the rest of us (such as the efforts made by workers and businesses) we are bequeathing a weaker Australia to our children.
What you win is as important as who wins
As Henry says, young Australians are getting depressed not necessarily by what the tax system is doing to them today (although what negative gearing and capital gains tax cuts are doing to house prices can't help), but from the way we are suffocating efforts to build the economy they will inherit.
He says we should level with them and level with ourselves, which is also the argument of Mixed Fortunes, the book detailing the history of tax reform in Australia by former treasury official Paul Tilley that Henry launched.
It's an argument that the journalists in the audience (I'm one) and the lone politician in the audience (Assistant Treasury Secretary Andrew Leigh) should take to heart. I'll still report on the winners and losers next month, but I'll also aim to go deeper to report what wins how and who.
Peter Martin is visiting a colleague at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. This piece first appeared on Conversation.
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