Reserve Bank boss Michele Bullock to appear at parliamentary committee hearing. Follow today’s news headlines live
Former treasury secretary Ken Henry has been speaking on radio this morning after a speech at Per Capita’s community tax summit yesterday where he said recent governments have carried out “wilful acts of bastardry” and created intergenerational inequality and environmental destruction that will leave younger voters worse off.
As part of his speech he recommended indexing tax thresholds to inflation. Freezing tax thresholds increases people’s taxable income as wages go up with inflation. This results in additional revenue to the government, in a phenomenon called “fiscal drag”.
I really never thought I would make such a recommendation, and for many years, didn’t need to.
I remember back in the 1980s, the second half of the 1980s, every time a new CPI number came out, then-treasurer Paul Keating had to convince a skeptical media that taxpayers were still paying less tax than had the tax scales being indexed for inflation. That is, that he was not relying upon fiscal drag to fix the budget so that every CPI release this had to be demonstrated. You know, the media was keeping treasurer Keating honest.
I have noticed that the retailers have tried to portray this as being about managers in their stores. We need to remember that we’re talking about people who are earning as little as $54,000 a year. Beyond that, there’s a principle here, which is weekends matter.
What we’re talking about here is an attempt by big business to change the minimum safety net, the award provisions, the safety floor that is supposed to provide minimum rates and conditions for workers.
And what we’re saying is that if employers want to have those sort of changes, they should negotiate with their employees as a whole rather than try to take them away from minimum conditions.
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Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/feb/21/australia-news-live-rba-michele-bullock-interest-rates-cost-of-living-election-anthony-albanese-peter-dutton-ntwnfb
Author : Stephanie Convery
Publish date : 2025-02-20 21:30:00
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