Tag: old rich men

Superannuation: Coalition guided by leftie Grattan Institute

20 August 2016

Grace Collier Columnist Melbourne @MsGraceCollier

Sacre bleu! In recent weeks, while defending the government’s superannuation policy in the media, Scott Morrison has morphed from a future prime minister into a dogmatic zealot.

Meanwhile in Canberra an under-the-carpet consultation process has begun. Coalition MPs are being canvassed by the party hierarchy about the superannuation “reforms” in an attempt to gauge the level of support or resistance before the changes are put to the house.

Will MPs vote for the policy or cross the floor and vote against it? The only MP who said he would cross the floor, George Christensen, has been made a whip, so does that mean he has been bought off?

And if the superannuation policy does pass the lower house, will some sage operators in the Senate threaten to block the Australian Building and Construction Commission bill and force the government to change the policy anyway, and thus make a fool of the wimps who voted for it?

These are the important questions of our time.

Typically, among Liberal MPs courage seems to be in short supply. Apart from one exception, who floored me by asking, “Why should we tax people less just because they’re old?”, every MP I spoke with thinks the policy is appalling and must be immediately sunk — by someone else.

Meanwhile, looking on is the base: the Liberal rank and file, the members, the donors and the volunteers. Here is where fury and despair remain widespread. Policymakers needn’t panic, this is not about the desire to avoid tax. Everyone knows half the households in this country are addicted to their welfare — er, “transfer payments” — and someone has to pay for that.

Out there in the real world, among half of us at least, there is acceptance we are compelled to work to fund the necessities of life, such as family tax benefits to the middle class, corporate welfare, politicians’ entitlements, education industry rorts, childcare scams and the installation of squat toilets in the Australian Taxation Offices. The only fly in the ointment is that the Coalition’s superannuation policy is terrible. Labor’s superannuation policy is better.

I am told that before the election, cabinet waved the policy through simply because nobody understood it and time constraints were pressing. Indeed, the policy is complex, contradictory and bizarre.

There is a cap of $1.6 million, yet hardly anyone is allowed to get to that cap unless they inherit wealth or something like that. Most MPs don’t understand their own policy, let alone where it came from — a publicly funded left-wing think tank, the Grattan Institute. Its report Super Tax Targeting is sexist and ageist. It urges the government to take money off “rich old men” who don’t need it and are committing “intergenerational theft” anyway via their superannuation accounts. Further, self-funded retirees should be aware the authors of the report — John Daley, Brendan Coates and Danielle Wood — regard them as greedy pigs.

Look at the report’s cover, pictured below.

grattaninstitutereportimage

Sceptics who doubt the Liberals would be so foolish as to adopt the institute’s leftist agenda should seek out the report on Google and read just the first page.

Back in June, when a public furore broke out about the policy, the institute put out a media release by Daley and Coates. It was titled “Tax-free super is intergenerational theft” and said: “A number of politicians have struggled this week to explain the Turnbull government’s proposed changes to superannuation … this complexity explains why intergenerational ‘theft’ through superannuation has continued for so long. No one has ever explained why we should have an age-based tax system … some of these voters are now objecting vociferously to losing their privileges but they were never justified in the first place.”

I sent off emails asking the Coalition powers-that-be to deny their superannuation policy was based on or informed by the report, and whether they deny meeting the authors. The Treasurer and Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer declined to offer a denial and sent back a statement saying they talked to everyone.

Greedy pigs on the cover of the Grattan Institute report

The Grattan Institute was formed in 2008 and $30 million of taxpayer funds has been given to it.

It is housed in taxpayer-funded accommodation at the University of Melbourne and is crammed to the rafters with ex-Labor staff. All of this, in itself, is not such a bad thing. What is life without diversity? We can’t all be productive members of society. But the problem is that a body such as this shouldn’t be setting Coalition policy.

How on earth did this happen? Who knows, but the PM and his wife are listed on the “Friends of Grattan” web page as individual financial supporters. Further, Lucy Turnbull has been on the board since December 2012. So in the absence of any other rational explanation for the Liberals’ superannuation madness, there is always that.

How to destroy superannuation – just ask Grattan

Last November 2015, the SMSF Owners’ Alliance, put out a media release regarding the Grattan Institute’s attitude to superannuation. In view of Grace Collier’s article in the Weekend Australian (20-21 August 2016, page 22) “Leftie think tank behind super grab – Why should Coalition policy be based on the Grattan Institute’s recommendations?”, Save Our Super thinks it is timely to revisit the SMSF Owners’ Alliance media release.

25 November 2015

logosoa

An $11,000 cap on concessional contributions, as proposed by the Grattan lnstitute, would confine superannuation to being merely a substitute for the age pension rather than a vehicle for increasing savings for individuals and the nation.
This narrow approach defeats the purpose of superannuation. lf people can only save enough for retirement to be a bit better off than the pension then, rationally, they will spend their retirement savings as fast as they can and go on the pension. Where is the incentive to save more and be financially independent?
This is not the way to grow Australia’s retirement savings and give everyone the chance to live comfortably at a level related to their pre-retirement income, a concept known to economists as the ‘reasonable replacement rate’. This is generally accepted to be around two-thirds of pre-retirement income.

Grattan’s plan would throttle retirement savings and condemn millions of Australians to spend the last years of their lives in genteel poverty. Grattan quotes ASFA’s estimate that a retired couple need super savings of $640,000 for an “affluent lifestyle”. At a 5% return, that would give couples an income of $32,000 – hardly affluent.
It doesn’t allow for unexpected costs, such as surgery, house repairs or other necessities, that will run down fund balances. Nor does it allow for the likely high costs of care at the end of life which will have to be met by the taxpayer if people can’t afford to pay for themselves from their retirement savings.

As the Financial System Inquiry (FSl) noted, the biggest fear older people have is that their savings will not last all their lives. We suspect that Grattan really doesn’t like the idea of superannuation at all and would prefer everyone to be on the taxpayer funded age pension. Remember that when Labor announced their policy to tax super earnings above $75,000, Grattan said the limit should be $20,000 – about the same as the age pension. So in their view any income from savings above the age pension level should be taxed.

Superannuation is not a welfare system. lt is a retirement savings system that delivers important social and economic benefits to the nation. Grattan doesn’t see this distinction and seems to regard superannuation as a social engineering tool like the welfare system.
lf Grattan gets their way, Australia’s savings pool will be drained. There will be less money going into superannuation, less investment and fewer jobs – not least in the superannuation ‘industry’ itself. The corporations that back Grattan should think about this.

The Grattan Report repeats a couple of well-worn fallacies.
First, that the majority of superannuation tax concessions go to high income earners. Yes, they do, but high income earners pay proportionally more in income tax than they receive in concessions.
Grattan, and others, should acknowledge that higher income earners pay more tax. The Government’s ‘Better Tax’ website points out that the one third of taxpayers on incomes above $80,000 pay two thirds of income tax while the two thirds of taxpayers on incomes below $80,000 pay one third. ATO stats show that the top 20% of income earners pay 64% of income tax collected.

Second, Grattan comes up with a $25 billion cost to the budget of superannuation tax concessions. At least this is different to the usual $32 billion claim and moving in the right direction but it is just as flaky. As the Parliamentary Tax & Revenue Committee has been hearing, these numbers are not valid and even Treasury doesn’t stand by them.

Besides, mismanagement of the budget is not a reason to cut back on incentives for retirement savings. Governments need to get their real spending under control.

SMSF Owners believe the superannuation system is generally working well but can be improved. One way is to change the taxation of contributions. lnstead of everyone paying the same flat tax on contributions, there should be a flat (equal) tax benefit for everyone in the form of a rebate for super contributions keyed off an individual’s marginal income tax rate. This is the concept advanced in the Henry tax review five years ago, supported in principle by SMSF Owners in our Tax White Paper submissions and recently advocated by Deloitte Access Economics.

On our proposal, adjusting the front end taxation of contributions would allow the removal of taxes on fund earnings without affecting government revenue and boost tax-free retirement incomes so Australians can afford a comfortable and care free retirement. This would inspire Australians to save as much as they can, not as much as Grattan thinks they should.

lf there are to be changes made to the taxation of superannuation then they should be considered in the context of the whole tax system, including Australia’s highly progressive income tax rates. This is the outcome we are expecting from the current White Paper process which should deliver lower, simpler and fairer taxes for everyone.

Contact:
Duncan Fairweather
Executive Director

SMSF Owners
o4L2256200

dfairweather@smsfoa.org.au

www.smsfoa.org.au

It’s not intergenerational theft

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ozblogistan-blog-uploads/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/08/20101745/download-13.jpg

 

 

 

Greedy pigs on the cover of the Grattan Institute report

 

Catallaxy Files – Judith Sloan

20 August, 2016

Grace Collier is completely on the money to call out the Grattan Institute for releasing tacky, biased pap and using cheap undergraduate humour to make its point.  A picture of pigs with their snouts in the trough as representing people who have worked hard and saved according to the applicable superannuation rules.

In its campaign to impose higher taxation in order to fund bigger government, the Grattan Institute has come out with some completely loony proposals ($11,000 annual concessional contributions cap –  is this a joke?) dramatically to increase taxation on superannuation, proposals which have appealed to our left-leaning government.

Read my lips: we don’t have age-based taxation.  Current income is taxed in the same way irrespective of age.  The taxation of savings is another matter and every economist (not that Daley is not an economist) knows that savings need to be taxed in a different way from current income – apart from the little twinks at Grattan.  (Wood should know better, by the way.)

(What’s that you say?  The pigs are actually the staff at the Grattan Institute who have their snouts in the trough courtesy of two Labor governments just giving away taxpayer money ($30 million) without any competition and with nary a proposal as the ends to which the monies would be put.)

Here’s the key section of Grace’s piece:

Most MPs don’t understand their own policy, let alone where it came from — a publicly funded left-wing think tank, the Grattan Institute.

Its report Super Tax Targeting is sexist and ageist. It urges the government to take money off “rich old men” who don’t need it and are committing “intergenerational theft” anyway via their superannuation accounts.

Further, self-funded retirees should be aware the authors of the report — John Daley, Brendan Coates and Danielle Wood — regard them as greedy pigs. Look at the report’s cover, pictured [above].

Sceptics who doubt the Liberals would be so foolish as to adopt the institute’s leftist agenda should seek out the report on Google and read just the first page.

Back in June, when a public furore broke out about the policy, the institute put out a media release by Daley and Coates. It was titled “Tax-free super is intergenerational theft” and said: “A number of politicians have struggled this week to explain the Turnbull government’s proposed changes to superannuation … this complexity explains why intergenerational ‘theft’ through superannuation has continued for so long. No one has ever explained why we should have an age-based tax system … some of these voters are now objecting vociferously to losing their privileges but they were never justified in the first place.”

I sent off emails asking the Coalition powers-that-be to deny their superannuation policy was based on or informed by the report, and whether they deny meeting the authors. The Treasurer and Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer declined to offer a denial and sent back a statement saying they talked to everyone.

The Grattan Institute was formed in 2008 and $30 million of taxpayer funds has been given to it.

It is housed in taxpayer-funded accommodation at the University of Melbourne and is crammed to the rafters with ex-Labor staff. All of this, in itself, is not such a bad thing. What is life without diversity? We can’t all be productive members of society. But the problem is that a body such as this shouldn’t be setting Coalition policy.

How on earth did this happen? Who knows, but the PM and his wife are listed on the “Friends of Grattan” web page as individual financial supporters. Further, Lucy Turnbull has been on the board since December 2012. So in the absence of any other rational explanation for the Liberals’ superannuation madness, there is always that.