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Australians no longer feeling over-taxed, according to new survey
No full textAccording to a new survey out this morning, Australians no longer feel over-taxed.
In fact, many of us say we would pay more taxes if the money was spent on public services like health and education.
That\u27s the main finding of the 2015 tax survey conducted by the progressive think tank Per Capita.
The survey of 1400 Australians across all income groups also revealed a majority felt the tax system unfairly favoured the wealthy and big business - with nearly 60 per cent saying they would back tax concessions like negative gearing being scrapped or wound back.
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Guests
David Hetherington
Executive director, Per Capita
Credits
Producer
Sheryle Bagwel
The two economists: the Henry Tax Review
No full textThe Prime Minister promised the Henry report into tax would deliver \u27root and branch reform\u27. But just a day after the release of the response to the review many commentators agree it hasn\u27t delivered the promised fairer, simpler and stronger tax system.
This discussion about what\u27s in, and also out, features two regular Life Matters guest economists: Oliver Hartwich from the free-market-leaning Centre for Independent Studies, and David Hetherington from Per Capita, which describes itself as progressive
New report indicates falling wages growth will lower living standards
No full textFrom the early 1990s till the end of the mining boom in 2010, Australia had a dream run of economic prosperity.
Inflation was low, unemployment remained below six per cent, and the economy kept out of recession, even during the Global Financial Crisis.
It was a rising tide that lifted all boats - including the incomes of most workers.
But over the past couple of years, that wages tide has gone out, with major implications for living standards and the Federal Budget.
That\u27s the conclusion of a new report out this morning from the progressive think tank Per Capita.
Guests
David Hetherington
Executive Director of Per Capita
Credits
Producer
Sheryle Bagwell, Business Edito
Per Capita tax survey 2015: public attitudes towards taxation and government expenditure
Full text linkExecutive Summary : Australia has witnessed a remarkable shift in public attitudes to public spending and tax over the last two years. We no longer feel overtaxed. We want more spent on public services, especially health and education, and we are willing to pay more tax to enable that.
These sentiments were first revealed in the 2014 Per Capita Tax Survey, which marked a stark turnaround from earlier years of the Survey. In 2015, it is clear the same sentiments have hardened and that we are seeing a step-change in public attitudes after a decade in which anti-tax hostility was the norm.
Perhaps the most striking finding of the 2015 Survey is the extent to which Australians feel their tax system is unfair. Over 60% of respondents believe the system favours the wealthy. Overwhelmingly, they say that the wealthy and big business are not paying their fair share of tax. They view corporate tax avoidance in particular as a blight on the system. Only 3.2% say a tax cut for big business is warranted.
These changes have several probable causes. The first is that the Federal Government’s alarmist rhetoric has convinced Australians that the budget position can no longer sustain regular tax cuts, and more broadly that over-taxation is not a genuine problem. A second is that the Government’s approach to budget repair has inadvertently brought questions of fairness to the fore, demonstrating that the Australian public is strongly opposed to a range of regressive policies from the Medicare co-payment to the refusal to address over-generous tax concessions for the wealthy. Finally, the perception of unfairness is likely to be pronounced for wage-earners and households with children due to a weakening economic climate, in particular flat wages and rising unemployment. Economic insecurity and the fear of loss of livelihood are important drivers in the shift in attitudes towards tax.
This is the fifth Per Capita Tax Survey. The first Survey was in 2010, and it has been conducted every year since except 2013. In March 2015, the Survey asked a representative sample of 1,413 adult Australians about their attitudes to a range of questions on public spending and tax.
The specific results of the 2015 Survey are grouped into four main findings.
First, there is ongoing support for higher spending on public services. 69.3% of respondents want to see spending on services raised, while only 8.2% would rather spending were reduced. The most preferred areas for greater spending were health (with 83.3% support) and education (73.4%).
Second, we find that Australians are broadly comfortable with their own tax contributions. More than half of all respondents (53.2%) say either they pay about the right amount of tax or feel they pay too little. The gap between those who say they pay the right amount and those who say they pay too much is +12 points. This is a major turnaround from earlier surveys; in 2012, the gap was -16 points.
Third, Australians feel that the tax system is unfairly weighted in favour of high- income earners and large businesses. Two-thirds (66.9%) feel that high earners pay too little tax, and three-quarters (75.9%) think the same of big business. Over 60% say that the system favours the wealthy, and 65% think the best way to raise new taxes for public spending is to crack down on corporate tax avoidance.
Fourth the public strongly supports specific taxation and public spending policies which are progressive in nature. 77.6% of respondents would prefer spending
were cut elsewhere to pay for more funding of public schools, and most of these think spending should be cut in the non-government school system. 55.6% of respondents are opposed to a Medicare co-payment at any level, and 58.4% want to see negative gearing either restricted or abolished.
These results explain much of the opposition to measures contained in the Abbott Government’s first Budget, and why a number of them have since been abandoned. But they also suggest the government should do more to address some unfair aspects of the tax system. Policies to address corporate tax avoidance, negative gearing and superannuation tax concessions for the wealthy would be a good place to start. Given the political shift in the Abbott Government’s second Budget, and the ongoing deterioration in the budget position, such policies are becoming more and more needed.
A healthy and fair public sector and tax and transfer system is an integral part of a healthy economy. And a sustainable budget balance is an indicator, rather than a cause, of a healthy economy. The results of this year’s Survey suggest that, deep down, the electorate understands these fundamental truths
Is right the new left?
No full textThe ideas of Left and Right have long dominated politics. This Festival of Dangerous Ideas panel discusses whether these notions are still relevant in modern society. Luke Malpass (chair), Waleed Aly, Tom Switzer and David Hetherington each mount convincing arguments that many of the orthodoxies of contemporary political discourse better belong in the past, and that we need to re-think the application of terms Left and Right - and the politics that go with them.Sydney Opera House, October 2010
Source:
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas is presented by:
Sydney Opera House
St James Ethics Centre
Duration: 31m 30
What price stability? Market design in the Australian banking sector
Full text linkFew subjects in the public debate are more emotive than banking. Bankers’ actions, pay and profits have been ferociously dissected in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In Australia, we were fortunate that our banking system and broader economy survived the crisis in good health. But banks’ behaviour here continues to attract scrutiny.
This report examines our banking debate through the prism of market design. It analyses the major faultlines, identifies enduring market failures and proposes a policy response. There are three main points of tension: 1) whether the banks should follow the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) in setting interest rates; 2) whether rising funding costs have necessitated the banks\u27 rate increases; and 3) whether banks are too profitable relative to the risk they face.
On the first two points, the report finds in favour of the banks – they are rightly the arbiters of their own rate settings, and rising funding costs have indeed led banks to raise rates. On the third point, we find that the Big Four banks are more profitable than the risk attached to their equity would justify, thanks to implicit insurance provided by the state and a market structure which makes their operations more capital intensive than necessary
Social innovation, public good: new approaches to public sector productivity
Full text linkThis report argues that rather than outsourcing ever more public services, governments should introduce social impact bond models within the public sector.
Executive summary
In one of his first major steps as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott has delivered on his promise to establish a Commission of Audit into the Commonwealth public sector. The exercise is in the image of similar commissions called by incoming Premiers in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
The Commission will find, as its state counterparts have done, that the public sector exhibits poor productivity and should be reduced in size, with important services to be outsourced to the private sector. That this finding can be predicted so confidently in advance should raise questions over its validity. In truth, public sector productivity is a nebulous concept and is being used as a smokescreen to cut spending by governments unwilling to rebuild a broken tax base.
How do you track outputs per hour or per dollar when the desired outputs are so hard to measure? How does one \u27price\u27 a well-educated child or a rapidly cured patient?
Since they are unable to do this, governments instead adopt narrow \u27target\u27 measures as proxies for productivity, such as hospital waiting times and standardised test scores. But a focus of these narrow measures often results in the target being achieved at the expense of other equally desirable policy outcomes.
Faced with this, governments resort to an \u27efficiency dividend\u27, an annual budget cut (typically 1-2% p.a.) which assumes public service agencies can deliver the same outcomes with less resources each successive year. In the absence of hard data on outcomes, the efficiency dividend acts as little more than a crude cost-cutting
device.
What then is a sensible way forward, which recognises the need for accountability within the public sector while acknowledging the limitations of private sector productivity measures? This report argues that answers might lie in the not-for-profit sector, where a range of new approaches to performance are being developed.
Foremost among these is social return on investment, which seeks to measure the social benefit of an initiative against the financial investment required to deliver it. This happens to describe neatly the productivity task facing public service agencies: maximise your social benefit given a fixed investment of taxpayers\u27 money.
In fact, governments have begun to apply these new approaches to traditional public sector tasks using social impact bonds. These instruments involve private and philanthropic investors investing their own capital to deliver public good outcomes. The first bond in the UK sought to reduce recidivism while three new bonds in NSW aim to assist vulnerable children, reduce the need for out-of-home care, and prevent adult reoffending.
These experimental new approaches are to be welcomed but they should not been seen as replacements for public sector capacity. If we continue to steadily shrink our public sector capacity, as has happened in NSW, QLD and VIC in recent years, we will lose thousands of years of accumulated know-how and experience. Should we decide that these cutbacks have been misguided, this know-how and experience will be impossible to replace.
Instead, governments should seek to experiment with these innovative new approaches within the public service. Per Capita proposes that governments trial social impact bonds with Treasury acting as the independent investor and groups of public sector staff acting as the agents of innovative change.
Under this model, public sector staff within a specific agency or departmental unit could opt-in to a \u27public service venture\u27. This venture would agree to specific policy targets and a budget with Treasury and would be given a wide degree of operational autonomy to pursue these targets without intervention from above. Examples of such targets might include the on-time running of a district bus service, reducing obesity levels within a local population or speeding the recovery and return of injured workers to the workplace.
If the targets are met within the agreed timeframe, the venture\u27s staff would receive incentive payments in excess of their usual salaries. The staff share in the risk of the venture too, so they face loss of income or other entitlements should the venture fail to achieve its targets.
This sharing of risk and reward is a central feature of the social impact bond model, and there is no reason why motivated public sector staff should not be able to access similar opportunities. If early trials of the public sector venture model are successful, it may evolve such that external investors are able to fund groups of staff that have earned greater autonomy through performance.
If, on the other hand, we fail to experiment with new approaches to unlock public sector innovation, we may one day find we have outsourced invaluable capability from the public sector that we can never replace
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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