The Australian tax system is broken. Not raising sufficient tax to balance the books, invest for the future & pay for world class education & health systems.
What the government should do immediately. 1) End Negative Gearing. Why should we pay people to buy already over priced houses? 2) Fix tax brackets to earnings growth rates. Ending 'bracket creep'. 3) Increase GST to 15%. The more you spend the more tax you pay. Despite the Labor party spin poor people do not pay more GST than rich people, it is a much fairer tax than direct income tax. 4) Scrap the Medicare Surcharge & change it to an upper band of the Medicare Levy stopping at $250,000. People are avoiding paying tax by buying private medical & not using it, the extra tax raised can be spent on the health system. 5) Increase tobacco duty $5 a year on a packet cigarettes until the price reaches $50 a packet. Increase tobacco duty on pouched tobacco to a level pro rata to cigarettes. If people are too dumb to smoke, tax them out of it. 6) Increase the tax free personal allowance to $30,000 a year, adjusting all the other brackets so that the benefit is limited to incomes below $90,000. 7) Introduce a 'death tax' for estates above $2.5m at a flat rate of 19%. 8) Tax income within trusts at the same rates as income tax, with an imputation system. 9) Change Medicare rates to actually reflect what the health care system costs, reducing income tax rates to a net nil effect. Complete transparency between the cost & taxation, if people want more spent on the health system they can vote for it. 10) Make bulk billing mandatory for all medical services, adjust payments to medical practitioners to an appropriate level dictated by an independent body. Ending the rip off of the tax payer by medical practitioners. 11) Scrap all 'middle class welfare', tax credits, child/payments bonuses. Make people more accountable for the cost of raising their own families. 12) Ban the use of cash for payments above $10,000 in a single transaction, clamping down on tax evasion in the grey economy. Intentionally splitting payments into smaller transactions is already a crime, perverting the course of justice.
Yes there is a load of money that can be saved through waste, however after 6 years of Coalition governments the books are only just being balanced when there should be a big surplus at this stage of the economic cycle. Clearly the tax/spend balance is not right.
