Some excellent news from Canberra. Turnbull's corporate tax cuts have been shelved, for now at least. He wants them in the May budget which means another attempt at getting them through the senate, which has already said no.
It did get pretty close though. Only two crossbench senators in it who refused to budge. Pauline Hanson and her One Notion party caved. My haven't they now got egg on their faces. Hanson is supposed to be for the common man, and there she was supporting the big end of town. She's already copped a lot of flake over it. She's a sham.
Congrats to the two hold out senators who wouldn't swallow the trickle down lie. That being newcomer Tim Storer, and the walking headline Derryn Hinch.
It started as almost an inevitable thing that the gov was going to pass (pun intended) these insane tax cuts that relied completely on the 30 year lie of trickle down economics. After all, this argument had been around for decades and was largely accepted as gospel in the halls of power. Who would argue with it?
However, after years of beating up the poor and ill and extracting money from them that they didn't have, after cutting $50 billion in federal funding to Australia's hospitals and support services for people that were in need of them, after years of banging the austerity drum, the $65 billion worth of tax cuts to corporations became a bridge too far.
It sparked a national debate in Australia about the worth of doing this for wages, jobs, and public services that we all rely on. Did trickle down really work? Why were banks shedding thousands of workers whilst making record profits? Many corporations weren't even paying any tax anyway, including the multinationals and Qantas, who were insisting the tax cuts were needed. Why are executive salaries at record levels, often even with bad performance, whilst wage growth was stagnant?
Then came the straw that broke the camels back. A leaked report from the Business Council of Australia where only one in five businesses said they would give workers a wage rise if the tax cuts passed. It was the nail in the coffin, and the two last holdout senators refused to budge.
Sad that such a lie as Reaganomic trickle down even got that close to passing into law such an obscenity as was the corporate tax cuts after so many years of evidence proving it didn't work. But the cats out of the bag now in Australia, and it would be very hard for the gov to put it back.
The Australia Institute is credited for putting forward intelligent arguments against the tax cuts during the furious debate over them, the gov rhetoric becoming almost hysterical. From an email today:
BREAKING: The Government has shelved the big business company tax cut until after the Federal Budget as it doesn't have the numbers in the Senate.And this from SBS:
Research matters, and thanks to your ongoing support we at The Australia Institute have been able to continue to promote our company tax research and provide ongoing briefings of our research to Senators in Parliament on why the case for the company tax cut has collapsed.
The Australia Institute research has demonstrated time and again that the economic case for these company tax cuts just does not stack up.
The economic case for these company tax cuts was never proven: the benefits were largely to foreign shareholders, with a huge long term revenue cost to the budget. It is a fiscal time-bomb. The Australia Institute via email
Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh said the government has fallen short in the Senate on a corporate tax cut it has tried to justify at every turn.
"There is one simple number to illustrate why they have failed and that's four out of five," he told reporters in Canberra, referring to a reported "secret" survey by the Business Council that found four out of five CEOs wouldn't spend the cut on wages.
Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson said that survey "broke the camel's back".
"I believe there isn't the mood in this parliament for tax cuts and I think we've seen the end of them," he told reporters in Canberra.
Oxfam Australia chief executive Dr Helen Szoke hoped the tax cuts would be "buried for good".
"The proposed $65 billion hand-out to big business will only fuel a global race to the bottom on corporate tax rates and undermine attempts to tackle inequality and poverty, both in Australia and around the world," she said in a statement. SBS
#ReachTEL poll ALP 54 - Coalition 46 pic.twitter.com/DcpZRNTqr9— Rowan (@FightingTories) March 29, 2018
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