Tax cuts for highest income earners to unfairly benefit men
Costings by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office for the Greens show the tax cuts – which would provide major income tax relief to high-income earners and are supported by both Labor and the Coalition – will cost $243 billion by 2032-33.
Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus said the union movement had “always opposed the stage three tax cuts” and the money would be “better spent solving our national challenges”. “They were very unfair at the time that they were put forward and approved, and they’re even more unfair now,” he said.
Labor is reticent to change or delay the tax cuts for fear it would be seen as a broken promise, with former prime minister Paul Keating’s scrapped L-A-W tax cuts and Julia Gillard’s no carbon tax promise still fresh in their minds. Many MPs are also alive to the fact that a significant portion of Labor voters now earn up to $200,000 a year and need a tax cut to deal with bracket creep.
Rather than touching the stage three tax cuts, some Labor MPs argued the government should over time do more to tackle superannuation tax concessions which cost the budget about $16 billion a year.