Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers has stated that while the Labor government will aim to remove some of the “rorts and waste” implemented by the current government, it will not be adopting the tax increases it proposed in the lead up to the 2019 election.
“We’ve made it clear that those policies around negative gearing and franking credits and the like, they won’t be something that we’ll be taking to the next election,” said Mr Chalmers in a Channel Nine interview this week.
In the lead up to the 2019 election, the Labor Party proposed a range of controversial policy measures to super and tax, including the removal of refunds for excess franking credits, lowering the non-concessional contributions cap, lowering the Division 293 threshold and introducing a pension exemption limit of $75,000 per annum.
Mr Chalmers said Labor would instead focus on ensuring multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax in Australia.
In a press conference this week, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said that Labor leader Anthony Albanese has stood for higher taxes throughout his whole career and “that no one should believe him now when he’s promising not a retirees’ tax or a housing tax that he did at the last election in which he was proud and he was pleased of those policies”.
“Labor’s refused to rule out more taxes. We saw that just yesterday from Jim Chalmers when he’s talking about making the tax system fairer. That’s a code word from Labor’s Jim Chalmers for higher taxes,” said Mr Frydenberg.
“He was out there saying that they [were] proud and he was pleased of the retirees’ tax and the housing tax and Labor’s superannuation tax and higher income taxes. That’s their record – higher taxes. That will be a very clear fault line at the next election.”
In the run-up to the last election, Labor repeatedly showed that it did not understand the concept of franking credits. It thought its policies would only affect people unlikely to vote Labor hence the advice “if you don’t like our policy then don’t vote for us”.