Australian Politics
Thursday, September 19, 2024
Clare O’Neil says Greens holding nurses and childcare workers hostage after they managed to delay Help to Buy vote
Greens were right for once. "Help to buy" will simpy jack up prices
Labor has intensified its assault against the Greens after Anthony Albanese was forced to delay a vote on a signature housing bill by two months, with Clare O’Neil accusing the minor party of holding the home ownership aspirations of childcare workers and nurses hostage.
The Prime Minister will visit the Queensland battleground seat of Leichhardt on Thursday to talk up his government’s plans to increase housing supply after the Coalition, One Nation and the United Australia Party’s Ralph Babet backed a Greens amendment to put off a Senate vote on the Help to Buy scheme until November 26.
Independent senators Jacqui Lambie, David Pocock and Tammy Tyrrell sided with Labor to reject the extension, as Mr Albanese warned: “Australians want their leaders to act now to make housing more affordable. This is too important to wait.”
Greens leader Adam Bandt declared the government had two months “to get serious about the housing crisis” and negotiate, while Housing Minister Clare O’Neil insisted the party had offered no amendments.
“What the Greens are doing is holding the aspirations of childcare workers and nurses to own their own home hostage, to generate media and attention,” she said. “This bill is not the silver bullet to Australia’s housing crisis, because there isn’t a silver bullet. Help to Buy is an important piece of the puzzle that would change the lives of 40,000 Australians and their families.”
Under the Help to Buy plan, which was a 2022 Labor election promise, eligible Australians would be able to purchase a home with a minimum deposit of 2 per cent. The government would own up to 40 per cent of a person’s home and recoup its funding, plus its share of capital gain, when the property is sold.
The Greens argue it would help just 0.2 per cent of Australia’s 5.5 million renters and push up housing prices for those who can’t access the program. They have demanded a cap on rent increases, a winding back of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount and money for a “massive” public housing build in exchange for their support.
As Peter Dutton labelled the tensions between Labor and the Greens a “civil war”, Mr Albanese and Queensland Premier Steven Miles will go to the state’s biggest social housing project – with 490 homes due to be built – ahead of work commencing next week.
“In spite of the No-alition of the Liberals, Nationals, Greens and One Nation we are determined to increase housing supply,” Mr Albanese said.
“This project will deliver hundreds of homes in regional Queensland, while complementing our plan to deliver thousands of homes through our Housing Australia Future Fund all around Australia.”
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ATO on the hunt for personal asset details, data
Robert Gottliebsen
Today I issue a danger alert to all those owning fine art, marine vessels, thoroughbred horses, caravans and motor homes, moderately expensive motor vehicles and aircraft.
The Australian Taxation Office has written to most major insurance brokers demanding details of their customers’ ownership of these assets.
Some insurance brokers, in informing their clients of the ATO demand, have relayed “soothing” words from the ATO (see below), but asset owners should have no doubt the ATO is preparing for an attack.
If the attack uncovers tax evaders and organised criminals, including drug dealers then it is a great event.
But, this action by the ATO raises serious issues and is being undertaken when it still has powers to misuse the information. And it is likely they will exercise those powers.
Knowledge of the ATO action hit my desk on the same day as we saw the incredible advances in technology which led to portable phone explosions, which will make data even less secure — particularly government data.
Currently ATO data holds records of income, expenses, addresses et cetera. But, now the ATO will have record of the money value and likely location of physical assets outside the family home.
The ATO assured insurance brokers the data will be kept safe, but in today’s world no data is safe, particularly data which is incredibly valuable to the criminal world.
And today’s organised criminals have no regard for the safety of the residents in the households they raid.
The very least the ATO should have done was to work with insurance brokers to minimise the data’s value to hackers and criminals.
Private groups around the world are realising — while doing everything possible to safeguard data — the danger, minimising the personal data on file. The ATO heads in the reverse direction.
The Australian Taxation Office is recognised as a world leader in trying to stop international companies from rorting the system, but, despite these efforts, the government will need to change the tax rules to get international companies to pay proper tax.
In the individual and family business arena, Australia has some of the most unfair tax rules in the world, which makes this asset disclosure a very dangerous weapon.
The ATO is already behaving very badly in “fishing” investigations of small and medium sized enterprises which pay their tax. The cost impost on those enterprises is enormous.
When the tax office issues an assessment it becomes an immediate liability and people facing this often fictitious liability have to prove their innocence, usually with no knowledge as to how the fictitious amount was calculated. Again, it’s a high cost exercise.
The ATO rarely uses this power against large corporations who can defend themselves.
The robodebt scandal was a good illustration because it was created by the use of flawed taxation data and ATO prosecution methods, although the ATO itself did not undertake the exercise.
The government should never have allowed this new ATO thrust until proper taxations safeguards were put in place.
I again emphasise that used with proper rules this can be a valuable tool against organised crime and the proceeds of drug distribution, as well as conventional tax avoiders.
I will now quote extracts from a letter to clients by one broker which I have agreed not to name.
Broker: “The notice requires us to provide the ATO with policy holder data for certain insurance policies that were active anytime during the period from July 1 2023 to June 30 2024 covering the following asset classes and value thresholds: Caravans and motor homes ($65,000); motor vehicles ($65,000); thoroughbred horses ($65,000); marine vessels ($100,000); fine art ($100,000 per item), and; aircraft ($150,000).
“The notice also requires provision of the following information to the ATO in respect of those insurance policies covering the above mentioned assets classes and value thresholds: Given name and surname(s); date of birth(s); addresses (residential, postal, other); Australian business number if applicable; email address and contact phone number”.
I would add using only a tax file number and/or business number would provide all the information the ATO needs and would help in data security.
The ATO also wants policy details on each asset, including: its start and end dates; policy cost; total value insured; the purchase price of the property insured; registration number or identification number of the property; a description, including year make and model of vehicles and marine vessels; primary use type and finance or other conditions.
The broker issues these words of comfort: “The ATO has informed us that the data may be used by the ATO in compliance profiling activities to help identify possible compliance issues involving income tax, capital gains tax, fringe benefits tax, GST and superannuation.
“The ATO will not use the data to directly initiate compliance activities but to assist with risk profiling and the identification of cases which present a higher risk.”
Frankly, this is ATO gobbledygook. They will use the data in every way possible — which is why they want so much detail.
The broker also sets out a why the demand is legal and why the broker has no choice but to provide the required information.
The ATO gives the information demand the title “Lifestyle assets data matching program”.
The late George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984 would have been full of admiration for the title, and may have even been a little upset that he didn’t think of it first.
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Divisiveness and dishonesty will unseat the teals
The conventional wisdom, that Peter Dutton can’t win next year’s election in his own right, assumes it’s impossible for the Opposition Leader both to win sufficient aspirational seats off Labor and to regain the seven formerly Liberal seats lost to the teals.
The Coalition’s cost-of-living pitch to win seats off Labor, it is thought, will not go over well in the teal seats, where well-to-do voters can afford to maintain luxury beliefs such as putting emissions reduction ahead of reducing power bills.
But this misunderstands what actually happened in 2022. The Liberals did not lose the teal seats because very large numbers of Liberal voters have permanently abandoned their longstanding preference for the party of freedom and free enterprise in favour of virtual Greens.
What the ANU’s Australian Electoral Study shows, in the most well-respected and in-depth analysis of the 2022 federal election result, is that only one in five people who voted teal had voted Liberal at the previous election; meaning four out of five did not. These weren’t disaffected Liberals – they were never Liberals in the first place. What helped them win was a sophisticated psephological strategy that depended on Labor running dead in seats with strong “independent” candidates, who then harvested Greens and Labor preferences, plus the votes of a much smaller number of discontented Liberals, to get ahead of the sitting Liberal MP.
The question, then, is what factors were at work to depress the Liberal vote back then; and are they likely to be replicated next year?
In 2022, the Coalition had been in office for nine years, had emulated Labor’s political cannibalism with a revolving door prime ministership, had dismayed traditional Liberals by massive spending and unprecedented restrictions on daily life in an over-reaction to the Covid pandemic, and had generally conducted themselves as a Labor-lite government, at least after Tony Abbott was deposed as leader.
As well, the voters who had been prepared to give Scott Morrison the benefit of the doubt in 2019, when Labor was promising extra taxes on investors and retirees, had a very different view after three years of his prime ministership and Labor was pretending to be a safe change.
While it’s true that there has been a long-term tendency, across the Anglosphere, for richer and more educated people to vote more to the left, and for poorer people to vote more to the right, a key factor in the teals’ favour was Morrison’s personal unpopularity and the fact that voting teal was a way to punish a disappointing government without actually voting Labor.
If only half of the 2022 Liberal defectors were long-term political emigrants to the left, as opposed to one-off malcontents who could come back, given that most of the teal seats are held with margins of under 5 per cent, there’s every reason to think that some will indeed return, at least with the right candidates. These are unlikely to be hardline conservatives or factional time-servers, but could be the kind of centre-right high achiever who used to abound in Liberal preselections before the party became so factionalised.
After all, if better-off voters want to register their disapproval of a government that pretended to be in the tradition of Bob Hawke but has governed more in the style of Gough Whitlam – by giving in to unions, breaking promises on tax cuts, weakening national security, and running an out-of-control immigration program, including gifting visas to people from Gaza without any serious security checks – they can’t do so by voting teal. If anything, in the event of a hung parliament, teal candidates will almost certainly line up behind the green-left Albanese government. So, the only way to register a protest against a bad Labor government is to vote Liberal, not teal.
In 2022, the teals’ pitch to previously Liberal voters was that they were the candidates that the Liberals should have had, were it not for the malign influence of vested interests, factions, and politics as usual.
In fairness to the candidates whom Simon Holmes a Court and his Climate 200 cohorts were politically savvy enough to endorse, they all had strong CVs, and looked reasonably representative of the progressive professionals who disproportionately live in up-market seats; without seeming like climate fanatics. But that’s not how they’ve turned out. In fact, based on their voting records, and on their public demands, they’ve been far more left-wing than Labor.
Based on public data produced by the Parliamentary Library, the teals’ closest political collaborators are not the Labor Party (they’ve voted with Labor about 70 per cent of the time on substantive matters before the parliament) but the Greens. On substantive bills before the parliament, they’ve voted with the Greens almost 80 per cent of the time.
What’s more, the teals’ most recent major public statement has been to attack the Albanese government for reneging on its commitment to declare a 2035 emissions-reduction target pre-election; and also to demand that the government commit to a full 75 per cent target in just over a decade. Sure, especially in teal seats, quite a few Liberal voters think that climate change is a key issue. But are they really going to stick with teal MPs who want to go further than Labor, especially given that Dutton is committed to net zero by 2050 and has a credible plan to get there, while keeping the lights on, by using nuclear power?
Now that they’ve been in the public eye for some time, the teals’ real political orientation is much clearer. It’s not just that they want stronger action on climate change than that proposed by the Morrison government; they also want stronger action than that proposed by the Albanese government, as well. Reading their parliamentary maiden speeches, for instance, they weren’t just supporters of the Indigenous voice but enthusiastic and passionate backers of the full Uluru – Voice, Treaty, Truth – agenda; and their enthusiasm for Indigenous separatism and their belief that Australian society is deeply flawed doesn’t seem to have been reconsidered in the light of the voice’s overwhelming defeat.
On this issue, too, they don’t just want stronger action than that proposed by the Morrison government but stronger action than that now proposed by the Albanese one.
Then there’s the shop-soil factor that afflicts all MPs, especially those who enter the parliament claiming to be morally better than everyone else. For someone accustomed to decry bad behaviour in the parliament, Zali Steggall’s recent slur, that Peter Dutton was somehow being “racist”, was especially unworthy. So, too, the continued claims of a “misogynistic” parliament. Sorry, girls, parliament is adversarial and that’s not the same thing. The battle of ideas is fundamental to our democracy, and to try to shame MPs into some sort of forced consensus because you don’t like having to argue your case or defend positions only underscores a lack of values and conviction.
My instinct is that, in the longer run, voters prefer politicians who are honest about where they stand and who are clearly different from their competitors. Labor-lite Liberals generally end up alienating traditional Liberal voters without winning over Labor ones. After all, voters normally prefer the genuine article to pretenders trying to be all things to everyone.
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WA loosens domestic gas restrictions but only until 2030
Any deregulation is good
Onshore gas projects in Western Australia will be allowed to sell 20 per cent of new supplies overseas via lucrative LNG contracts but only until 2030 and then the practice will be prohibited.
The policy tweak means the state Labor government has bowed to pressure from proposed developers who have warned they will not move to bolster supplies without being able to tap into lucrative export markets.
However, it remains unclear whether the loosening of the domestic gas policy will be sufficient for the likes of Strike Energy and Mineral Resources, which have both said rules must be changed to encourage them to drill for new supplies.
WA faces a looming gas shortage, with a recent state government report finding the state is staring at a 30 per cent shortfall over the next decade.
Developers have said the current requirement that 15 per cent of supplies remain in the state is too onerous and should be changed, and that would incentivise them to spend billions of dollars on new developments.
In a compromise, the WA Labor government will announce that new or expanded developments will be able to sell 20 per cent of supplies via LNG cargoes until 2030 and then developers will be unable to tap the overseas markets.
Caroline Cherry, WA director at the Australian Energy Producers, said the changes were sensible and measured.
“The Cook government has listened to the concerns of industry about ensuring reliable and affordable energy for the state and pulled the levers to bring on more new gas supply to serve rising demand for gas in coming years,” Ms Cherry said.
“More gas will be needed to serve rising demand supporting renewables in electricity generation as coal is phased out while underpinning the economic benefits produced by the mining sector as a key power source.”
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