Julia Gillard and ALP rally - but not in states they need to win


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/julia-gillard-and-alp-rally-but...

Labor's two-party-preferred support has also suffered because slight falls for the Greens, particularly in South Australia, mean a reduced preference flow to Labor.

...

After reaching record levels of support in Victoria and South Australia, the Greens have dropped back to the levels of primary support at the election last year or below.

In NSW, where ALP support has dropped, the Greens have kept 13 per cent primary support in the last half of this year, which is two percentage points up since the August election.

In Victoria, Greens' support has dropped back to 2010 election levels after hitting highs of 17 per cent and 16 per cent in the first half of this year.

In South Australia, there has been a similar movement in Greens' support, dropping back to 11 per cent last quarter after rising to 16 per cent during the announcement of the carbon tax in the March quarter.

The Greens recorded a primary vote in South Australia of 12 per cent at the election.

EDITORIAL

THE flicker of bipartisanship after the latest tragedy at sea has puttered out, leaving policy on boat people arrivals as cold-heartedly party political as before. The Gillard government remains adrift, its would-be escape via the Malaysia scheme scuttled by the High Court and given no chance of salvage through the refusal of co-operation in Parliament by the Coalition and Greens.

http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/editorial/take-the-fight-to-traffickers-201112...

Cut superannuantion tax breaks, says ACTU

UNIONS and welfare groups have vowed to push the Gillard government to overhaul $16 billion in yearly tax breaks on superannuation contributions, declaring they are unfairly skewed to give the most benefit to people earning more than $180,000.

Setting the scene for a Senate battle over the mining tax this year, the ACTU says plans to use some of the proceeds from the mining tax package of 11 bills to increase the superannuation guarantee levy from 9 to 12 per cent and give an automatic co-contribution of up to $500 a year for workers on $37,000 or less do not go far enough to correct imbalances in the system.

The peak union body has told a Senate economics committee inquiring into the minerals resource rent tax which passed the House of Representatives in November that the tax breaks on super contributions must also be made "more equal".

Under the existing system, a flat tax of 15 per cent usually applies to superannuation contributions. The 200,000 people earning more than $180,000 get a bigger tax concession as they otherwise pay the top marginal rate of 45c in the dollar in income tax and the Medicare levy on the money.

The ACTU says the system would be more equitable if the tax on super contributions was instead linked to the higher marginal personal income tax rate.

ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence said the concession was "one of the inequities in the tax system".

"The government is increasingly strapped for revenue," he told The Australian. "I think the areas of inequity and really tax minimisation that take place throughout the system, and this is one of them, need to be looked at. We will continue to argue for that."

The group has told the Senate committee: "While unions are strong supporters of the proposed increase in the superannuation guarantee and the concessional treatment of superannuation contributions, the ACTU recommends improvements to make the distribution of tax concessions more equitable. Unions will continue to press for further action to make the taxation of contributions more equitable."

The push has the backing of the Australian Council of Social Service, which is urging the Senate to make the laws conditional on a cut in the tax concessions for people in the top two tax brackets and an increased concession for people on low incomes.

"Tax concessions for both compulsory and voluntary saving through superannuation are justified to the extent that they compensate individuals for forced saving through compulsory superannuation and encourage voluntary saving to achieve an adequate income in retirement and reduce reliance on the age pension," ACOSS has told the Senate committee. "This means that they should ideally be targeted towards low- and middle-income earners since they are less likely to save for retirement, and more likely to rely on the age pension, in the absence of compulsion or tax incentives . . . However, despite the extension of superannuation to most workers, its tax treatment harks back to a time when superannuation was a perk for the well-off."

The push is being opposed by superannuation funds, which say the government's proposals in its mining tax package will provide more for low-income earners and that the tax breaks for upper-income earners have been scaled back after annual contribution limits were introduced in mid-2007 by the Howard government and Labor lowered the cap in mid-2009.

While the government has maintained that proceeds of the mining tax will enable increased superannuation for Australian workers, the increase in the super guarantee levy from 9 per cent to 12 per cent by 2019-20 will be paid for by companies, who estimate it will cost up to $20bn a year. The mining tax income will help cover the budget impact of the accompanying rise in tax breaks.

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia is finalising research on the "equity impact" of the superannuation tax arrangements and plans to present this to the Senate committee shortly.

Yesterday, the association's chief executive, Pauline Vamos, said the group commissioned the research after the Greens claimed that it was the wealthy who would reap the gains of the superannuation boost tied to the mining-tax package.

Ms Vamos said she was concerned the Greens were swayed by research from ACOSS, which she contends is skewed and does not take sufficient account of the impact of the contributions cap. She met the Greens recently to raise her concerns. "There's a lot of people who will not get access to the pension who we need to encourage to self-fund. What a lot of people don't understand is that with the ageing population, they will tighten up access to the aged pension. Low-income earners will always get access to the full aged pension and a health card. Where it will start to be means-tested more heavily is part pensions.

"Very wealthy people will fund themselves anyway and they hit the contributions cap. It's those middle-income earners that have not been in the system a long time that we have to get as self-funding people. We're in a time where we have an ageing bubble."

The heated debate underscores the potential for the mining tax to face turbulence in the Senate when it is voted on this year.

The office of Superannuation Minister Bill Shorten said yesterday that the government supported the concessional tax treatment and that its contribution for low-earners was a "significant new reform that will improve the fairness of the super system" by ensuring that 3.6 million Australians earning $37,000 effectively pay no tax on their compulsory super contributions by receiving up to $500 a year boost to super.

"The revenue from the MRRT goes towards paying for this new measure," his office said.

But Greens leader Bob Brown has claimed that the increased superannuation guarantee levy "is going to end up in the pockets of high-income earners rather than low-income earners".

The ACTU and ACOSS urged the Henry review to overhaul the tax breaks for super contributions and pushed the issue before the tax summit.

The Henry review found that about 2.5 million people were receiving little or no tax breaks for contributions and recommended employer contributions be taxed at marginal rates with a flat refundable offset available up to a cap. But in its response to the Henry review, the government instead lifted the super guarantee levy, promised the co-contribution of up to $500, and lifted the contributions cap from $25,000 to $50,000 for people over 50 with super assets of less than $500,000 from July 1. These measures are expected to cost the budget about $2.4bn over four years.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/cut-superannuantion-tax-breaks-...

Not news, an opinion piece


Bile over power is galling

DEMOCRACY can be a fragile creature; one that thrives best on respect for its institutions and a public belief in the ultimate equity of its processes.

At the very core of Australia's democratic system is the principle that we, the people, decide who will form our government. It is a system that eschews powerful technocrats and (apart from our outmoded ties to the British monarchy) rejects the concept of political representatives gaining office through breeding and patronage.

It has worked for us for more than a century and serves us well today.

We get the politicians we vote for by way of a system that legally requires all eligible adult citizens to participate in the electoral process. No one can claim they do not have a voice.

As such, the level of public angst over the make-up of our current Parliament is somewhat hard to stomach.

Granted, for the first time in some 70 years (since Robert Menzies formed government with the support of two Independents in 1940), neither side of politics holds an outright majority on the floor of the House of Representatives.

But the world has not stopped spinning on its axis, and the country is not in ruins.

In many respects, it could be argued the Parliament today is more representative and "democratic'' than ever, with all but the most routine legislation usually requiring a considerable degree of negotiating finesse and compromise.

In a global sense, this is often more the norm than the exception in Westminster-style democracies, Britain being a case in point today.

Yet here there are strident voices trying to claim that the current Parliament is in some way a travesty of democracy  that the Prime Minister is merely a puppet of the Greens (who themselves are directly descended from an unholy union between Lenin and the Antichrist himself).

Look, as regular readers would know, I am no card-carrying tree-hugger. As a strong supporter of our resources industry (my wife works in the energy sector) and an unreconstructed "petrol head'', the Greens  beyond much of their social justice platform  are not a natural ideological fit for me.

That said, about one in 10 Australians decided at the last poll that the Greens would best represent their interests, so today they hold the balance of power in the Senate and have one Lower House MP,  Adam Bandt.

That is the way democracy works and for those of you unhappy with the outcome, it is about time you realised that we do not keep holding elections until you get the result you want.

We have had Convoys of No Confidence, hateful demonstrations outside Parliament and a plethora of web-based campaigns such as Election Now (which seems to me little more than a front for climate-change extremists) and various Facebook groups clamouring for fresh elections on the grounds the current Parliament is not representative of the people's will.

One of the latest of these to pop up is Facebook group "I Bet We Can Get 10,000 People who think the Greens are W--kers''. Yes, sadly, that appears to be the depth to which political discourse in this country has descended.
So far just fewer than 4000 people have said they agree, which is about 0.25 per cent of the 1.6 million Australians who voted for the Greens in the Senate at the last election. So much for representative.

But then once you start reading what these mobs stand for and who follows them, it makes their claims of "Green extremism'' look  hypocritical.

Take the 10,000 W--kers site for example (and yes, I did mean to phrase it like that). When it was recently pimped by the Convoy people, the first posted response was from Matty Hayes, who wrote: "We just need a nice grassy knoll out the front of Parliament House Canberra and we could achieve so many of those dreams!''

Good one, Matty. Strike a blow for democracy, reasoned debate and the rule of law, mate.

Reading further, you see all the usual lies and half-truths about everything from asylum seekers to the myths of global warming.

There's even a helpful link directly to the web page of "Lord'' Christopher Monckton - the self-appointed English aristocrat and climate-change denier who makes a living peddling pseudo-science and conspiracy theories.

Above all, though, the common thread running through all the various discussions on these increasingly numerous sites is one of vitriol focused on the claim that our Government is somehow illegitimate because it relies on minority support.

Many of the claims made and charges levelled are deeply personal and derogatory  and in some cases defamatory or even unashamedly threatening.

Would the same carping nastiness exist if it were Tony Abbott in The Lodge relying on the support of Independents to hold power? I think not because, unlike so many on the far right of politics, those of us whose beliefs are painted in a lighter hue retain due respect for and understanding of the processes of a modern democracy.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/bile-over-power-is-galling/story-e6fr...