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Tag Archives: budget repair

Will Pauline be bullied into changing her mind?


The government is going to try to push through its company tax cuts in the next two weeks and requires the support of One Nation to do it.

To date, Pauline had said no, but she has been subjected to a concentrated campaign by the business community.

A few days ago, Simon Benson reported that five-minute video petitions from the Business Council of Australia and the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia, shot in Townsville, and clearly aimed at One Nation, have been sent to all Senate crossbenchers.

The business lobby also held three days of talks with local businesses in Cairns and Townsville to localise the impact on jobs.

So will Pauline cave-in?

Who can ever tell.

On her facebook page, Pauline has gone into overdrive about Labor’s planned changes to excess franking credits refunds.

“LABORS CUTS TO PENSIONERS – OVER MY DEAD BODY!”

Yet in 2016, she sang a different tune.

Hansen said successive governments, in a bid to win votes, had allowed welfare to become a way of life rather than a helping hand and “tough decisions” were needed.

“If we are going to be able to, in the future, support those who are truly in need, like the sick or the aged, we’ve got to do something about it now,” she said.

“I want the money to be put into hospital waiting lists and schools. Infrastructure in this country is ridiculous.”

This was in explanation to the budget cuts proposed by the government and supported by One Nation.

They included: $2.9 billion in Family Tax Benefit end-of-year supplements; $1.3 billion carbon tax compensation for future welfare recipients; $1.2 billion by stopping the “double dipping” of paid parental leave; and $600 million in assorted measures including freezing eligibility thresholds, ending a pensioners education supplement and making dole recipients wait a period before receiving payments.

Senator Hansen said the government should go even harder, suggesting the wait period for the dole should be 3 months, and there should be a tougher approach to the disability support pension, including biennial reviews of all recipients by government-certified doctors to ensure the pension was warranted.

For Pauline, it was all about budget repair.

“Right across the board, not only in welfare, I see a big waste of money and we actually have to rein it back in.”

Perhaps Pauline doesn’t quite understand the proposed changes to franking credit refunds or perhaps she has changed her mind about welfare going to those that needed it.

But if she still cares about budget repair, will she accept Matthias Cormann’s sales pitch, or will she see a cost of $65 billion for no assured gain?

Cormann is really pushing hard.

“Families around Australia wanting to get ahead need their Senate to pass our business tax cuts for all businesses in full,” Senator Cormann said. “Their future job opportunities, job security and wage increases depend on more businesses being more successful and more profitable into the future.

“We can’t put our businesses at a competitive disadvantage compared to the businesses from other parts of the world. This is commonsense, plain and simple. Bill Shorten has been blinded by his adoption of socialist ideology and is putting his extreme and reckless views ahead of what is in the best interests of our economy.”

Why does no-one ever stop him to say our average rate is 17% and our effective rate is 10.7%, making us already very competitive. Our overly generous allowable deductions and ‘legal’ tax loopholes result in many companies paying no tax.

It isn’t the tax rate that attracts investment here, as foreign companies keep explaining, with much of our foreign investment coming from countries who already have lower company tax rates than ours.

Unless companies raise dividends, it will only be foreign shareholders who benefit from a cut in our company tax as Australian shareholders will have to make up the difference in income tax. And if companies raise dividends, then how can they afford to raise wages as well?

So how much of this can Pauline absorb? Will she be strong enough to resist the very concentrated pressure? Will they win her support by promising to only let white Christians migrate here?

My guess? White South African farmers should book their tickets.