In a Financial Review article 2-3 years ago Paul Keating admitted to flirting with the idea of introducing a GST but said he decided against it because he felt you could not trust politicians. The revenue would never be enough to meet all their programs, so it would just become an extra tax that would be manipulated up.
Howard was mean enough to sell us the GST on the back of a lot of promises that it would improve things and that it would solve Australia's looming aging population problems. I expect a Labor govt will up the rate using some such convolutated argument. This so called population aging issues has been used to justify anything the government knows is unpopular. Instead of providing incentives for child rearing and assisting family formation, this govt just wanted to tax people more. Labor will be just as bad, if not worse.
