Let’s talk about… tax, baby

“Why, oh, why can’t we have the tax debate we need to have?” moan Australia’s political commentariat in the wake of the Albanese tax pivot. Maybe they could find the answer staring them in the face, if they’d pause long enough to look into the mirror.

It’s the Australian media’s love of conflict, and willingness to amplify and prioritise the whinging of vested interests, that continues to block any meaningful change. And underpinning it all has been the decades-long political discipline of the right-wing neoliberal low-tax voice — or News Corporation as it’s formally known.

It popped up as a sideline last week when the usually low-key indexation of excise found itself on the front page of The Daily Telegraph as “Excise Pain: Tax to Drive Us to Drink”. 

The ABC’s reporting out of central Queensland was similar, if less shouty. “If you enjoy a tipple get ready to pay more,” it led, followed on by a dozen paragraphs quoting Amanda Lampe, the director of corporate relations for Diageo, the multinational owner of the iconic Queensland brand Bundaberg Rum (and former Gillard chief of staff). It also gave space to the Australian Distillers Association CEO (and former NSW Labor MP) Paul McLeay. The piece briefly both-sided the report with a few quotes from the Drug and Alcohol Foundation before wrapping up with the obligatory small business outrage from a family-owned distillery.

Think it’s a one-off? In last July’s round of excise increases, the ABC’s reporting focused on the rise in beer price, with the outrage supplied by Brewers Association CEO (and former Peter Costello and Liberal Party adviser) John Preston. 

Coincidentally, alcohol companies donated $1.3 million to Australia’s political parties in the last financial year, according to the Foundation of Alcohol Research and Education, which has a remit to ensure “Australians engage with honest and accurate information to reduce the risks of alcohol harm”.

It demonstrates just how journalistic judgments of what’s news — and the active gaming of those judgments by corporate interests — shape the political discourse, long before we get to having the sort of thoughtful debate the Canberra insiders reckon they’re gagging for.

It’s not new: thought bubbles about tax have been popping off around Australian politics from side to side for close to 50 years. Back in 1978, NSW premier Neville Wran built the Labor Wranslides off the idea of Malcolm Fraser (and his treasurer John Howard) to return partial income tax powers to the states. Two years later Fraser returned the favour, winning reelection off the back of a News Limited-powered campaign over capital gains tax and the family home.

It all meant that it was not until the Hawke government was comfortably into its second term that, off the back of a major tax “summit”, that it was prepared to implement the sort of wide-ranging tax reform that widespread tax evasion had made essential, with the Fringe Benefits Tax and Capital Gains Tax.

More recently, the mining industry’s astroturfed campaign against the Rudd government’s mining tax opened the door to the Gillard leadership challenge. In return the embrace of the carbon tax rhetoric by the minority Gillard government gave the opening to Tony Abbott’s “Axe the Tax” 2013 election, before, as the ABC’s Nemesis has been telling us this month, he lost his job, in part over the increased tax (branded a “deficit levy”) on high-income earners.

The Rudd, Gillard and Abbott experiences demonstrate that the “broken promises” mantra is often just another rhetorical twist in the neoliberal low tax campaign (in the interests of taxpayers, of course) now so deeply embodied in Australian journalistic practice. It explains, too, why the Albanese tax pivot (keeping the cuts, while redistributing the money without affecting powerful lobby groups) didn’t bite the government — not so far, anyway — and why it’s unlikely to pick up the negative gearing change proposed by the Greens.

The hostility to tax reform with all the inevitable winners and losers is not unique to Australia — it’s the resistance to even having a serious debate that’s odd. Taxes and tax rates are a common matter of debate in US elections (although the structural dysfunction of a Congress responsive to lobbyists means it rarely translates into actual reform). In a higher-taxing Europe, it’s been just another of the levers to be pulled as part of the ongoing rolling crises since what the northern hemisphere calls the Great Recession of 2008.

The developed world is busy searching for the economic model that replaces the neoliberalism that crashed in 2008. Perhaps if Australian journalists could get out of their own rule-in, rule-out gotcha sensibility for more than five minutes, they’d be doing a better job of helping their readers participate in the sort of debate democracy needs, including about — gasp! — tax reform.