Angus Taylor’s budget reply speech may appeal to One Nation supporters, but it doesn’t provide credible answers to the nation’s problems.

For as long as most of us can remember the Liberals have cultivated the perception that they are the better economic managers. But since Labor took power four years ago, the lack of policy by the Liberals has meant that the assumption that they can be trusted to manage the economy better no longer holds.

Consequently, the budget reply speech by the Liberal’s new leader, Angus Taylor, was more than usually awaited. This was an important opportunity for Taylor to set a direction and economic strategy for the Liberals that will seize back votes, especially from One Nation, and make the Liberals competitive again electorally.

The three major policy differences between the Liberals and Labor that Taylor concentrated on were:

Repeal of the government’s proposed changes to the capital gains tax, negative gearing, and taxation of trusts, and instead commit to indexation of the tax scales so that for the typical worker their average tax rate would never change.

Reducing migration numbers and tying the number of new migrants to the number of new homes built.

Rejecting Labor’s net zero policies and (allegedly) get cheaper energy by digging coal, drilling oil, and nuclear.

The centrepiece of Taylor’s speech was his promise that a future Coalition Government would repeal Labor’s proposed changes to the capital gains tax, negative gearing and the taxation of trusts.

According to Taylor these “higher taxes aren’t economic reform. They’re an assault on aspiration”.

What Taylor totally ignored is that, as Aruna Sathanapally and Matthew Bowes wrote in P&I (15 May), Australia’s personal income tax system is imbalanced as it “leaves taxes on wages and salaries to do the heavy lifting, while granting generous concessions to income from wealth”.

As Treasury analysis shows, the combination of these three tax concessions tax concessions was worth more than $700,000 over their working life for the top 1 per cent of taxpayers by........

© Pearls and Irritations