Senator Andrew Bartlett
Sunday, June 05, 2005
 
Taxing Times Coming Up in the Senate

The draft legislation program has been released for the final fortnight of Senate sittings before the Government takes control on July 1st. The list for the first week can be found here . As is usual at the end of a session, the full list contains a ludicrously high number of Bills – 68 of them contained in 56 separate packages. In addition, there will almost certainly be a couple of motions to disallow Regulations and probably a few motions to refer matters to Senate Committee for inquiry. On top of this, Monday 13th June is a public holiday in Canberra, so we have just seven sitting days to deal with the whole lot.

Not surprisingly, the very first item the Government has listed for debate is the "Personal Income Tax Reduction" Bill which implements the tax cuts announced in the Budget. I expect this will provide the opportunity for a lot of political posturing and pontificating, most of it short-term and transitory as usual.

I saw newspaper articles over this weekend by Michelle Grattan, Matt Price and Glenn Milne all having a go at Kim Beazley in various ways for Labor’s strategy of opposing the Government’s income tax cuts in the Senate. Basically, the criticism revolves around the pointlessness of opposing the tax cuts when the Government will be able to pass them in August anyway when it gets control of the Senate, thus just holding everything up for what appears to be political purposes and inconveniencing everybody in the meantime. I can understand this criticism and I even agree with most of it, although for somewhat different reasons.

What really gets up my nose about Labor’s stance is that they didn’t oppose the Government’s unfair income tax cuts in the Senate last year when it actually would have made a difference (particularly given that last year’s windfall tax cuts to the highest income earners were even more unfair than this year’s). I haven’t seen anyone mention this discrepancy, but it is this more than anything else that makes Labor’s stance this year seem very hollow to me.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Sunday, June 05, 2005 Permalink
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