The former Treasury secretary has just done the useful job of putting a better tax system, which might be the driving force for other reforms, back on the table.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has comprehensively blown the whistle over Australia’s 20-year slumber on tax reform. Dr Henry led the last big review of tax, ordered by then-treasurer Wayne Swan, mentor to today’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers. The fate of his review was to be kneecapped from the start by keeping GST reform off-limits, and then cherry-picked by the Rudd government when it was finished for what Dr Henry says now was the “easy, populist” grab of a mining super profit tax.
than had they acted to reverse the decline. Reforming the tax system to put incentive at its heart is critical to that happening. Another tax review, says Dr Henry, is not needed. Everybody knows what needs to be done. What it does need, he says, is a politician who can live up to the challenge. There is nothing fair about undermining economic growth and denying opportunities, or locking in generational unfairness.
Dr Henry’s 2010 tax review noted that Australia had 100 taxes that rested on mostly narrow bases, and little will have changed. Any tax reform has to deal with inevitable charges of unfairness. But as Dr Henry says, there is nothing fair about undermining economic growth and denying opportunities, or locking in generational unfairness.
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