Labor hypocricy on franking credits exposed, page-10

This guy nails it!
Cashed-up retirees getting a refund for tax they never paid? We've hit peak rort


Some of the wealthiest Australians pay negative tax and still get to call themselves self-funded
hard to believe that anyone who receives large cheques from the government can call themselves a “self-funded” retiree, but hey, this is modern Australia and powerful groups get to call themselves whatever they want. Sure, the full age pension is only $23,823.80 per year for a single person and, sure, some wealthy retirees get cheques for “spare” dividend imputation credits worth far more than that – but if those cashed-up voters want to call themselves “self-funded”, Scott Morrison isn’t going to burst their (taxpayer funded) bubble.
The term “self-funded” retiree has become as ingrained, and meaningless, as the term “dole bludger”. Just how it came to be that all old rich people “worked hard and paid their taxes”, while all unemployed people are lazy and in need of tough love, has been lost in the mists of focus groups past. But the cynicism in the way we talk about those with the most and those with the least speaks volumes about modern Australia. The land of the “fair go” is long gone.



Most self-funded retirees have been receiving enormous amounts of other people’s money for a long time. Those with millions of dollars in superannuation have received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tax concessions over their lives. The most egregious was introduced by Peter Costello in 2007, when he made income from superannuation entirely tax-free. A wealthy Australian with a multimillion-dollar house and a million in superannuation can draw a pension of $100,000 per year and not pay a cent in tax. Someone working on the minimum wage of $37,398 per year pays more tax than a lot of our wealthiest superannuants.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...nd-for-tax-they-never-paid-weve-hit-peak-rort