MacroBusiness.com.au reader and commenter “Mav” draws our attention to journalist Paul Cleary’s book, “Too Much Luck”.
In it, we find more dirt on Gillard and Swan’s dirty deal with the multinational miners. Cleary’s tome sheds new light on the collusion between ALParatchiks such as then ALP national secretary Karl Bitar and BHP Billiton, the foreign-owned miner leading the anti mining tax campaign, in overthrowing a popularly-elected prime minister:
As soon as Rudd sprang the new tax on the industry, the big three companies decided they had to kill this plan – and they decided to play dirty. When London-based Rio Tinto, Melbourne-based and London-listed BHP Billiton and Swiss-based Xstrata put their collective weight together, they are a formidable combination. Their total combined value on global sharemarkets is $450 billion, 86% of which is in foreign hands. The three companies are worth more than the size of Australia’s federal budget, about one-third the size of the entire Australian economy. Together they embarked on a savage lobbying effort to bring down the proposed tax by attacking the government and its prime minister. They began this extraordinary campaign before the proposal had even been put into legislation, and before the parliament had had the opportunity to review it.
BHP led the offensive, establishing a ‘war room’ inside its Melbourne head office. Run by senior financial executive Gerard Bond, along with senior staffers and external consultants, this team worked on the project for about seven weeks. BHP commissioned its own focus-group research, which was used to drive a $22 million TV and print-media blitz and a targeted lobbying campaign that included Geoff Walsh, a former national secretary of the ALP and former staffer to prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. BHP spared no expense on the campaign, which reported directly to CEO Marius Kloppers. External talent included the market-research specialist Tony Mitchelmore and the corporate strategist John Connolly. Mitchelmore had been plucked from obscurity by Labor to work on the Kevin07 campaign and had stayed on doing qualitative research before working for BHP on this campaign. He organised an intensive round of sixteen focus-group sessions, which revealed that many participants believed Rudd’s proposal had come out of left field and was likely to derail the one industry that was keeping Australia’s head above water. Realising that they had a good chance of killing the tax, the miners adopted a ‘whatever it takes’ approach…
The miners’ efforts were spectacularly successful. Seven weeks and four days after unveiling the preliminary plan, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was deposed and so was his tax… Big Dirt, as the three companies were now known, executed regime change two months before the voters exercised their democratic rights at the ballot box. Having subverted a functioning democracy [TBI: aided and abetted by Gillard & Swan], mining executives were celebrating in airport lounges around the country…
Immediately after becoming prime minister on 24 June, Julia Gillard turned her attention to thrashing out a deal with the three multinational miners. Eight days later, she announced a breakthrough that cut the marginal tax rate from 40% to 22.5%, restricted its scope to coal and iron ore, and added some creative accounting concessions for the big miners… A raft of emails released under FOI shows that BHP was very much running the show. Its executives drafted the heads of agreement before emailing it to Wayne Swan’s office for approval.
Repeating her ‘moving forward’ mantra, Gillard announced the compromise like this: ‘It moves things forward whether you’re a coal miner in the Bowen basin, a contractor in Karratha, an opal miner in Coober Pedy or a young worker in Sydney’. In fact, the MRRT deal made life worse for smaller Australian-based miners by removing the resource exploration rebate and by awarding big miners a significantly lower tax rate. For iron-ore miners with mature projects, which means the big companies, their projects would be taxed at 36.4 per cent – close to or even below current levels – whereas small or medium-sized projects would pay an average rate of 48.9 per cent, according to modelling produced by Treasury and released under FOI. The big miners benefited from a concession that allows them to calculate deductions for tax purposes using the market value rather than the purchase price (or ‘book value’) of their assets, providing huge depreciation allowances. The small and medium Australian players were not represented in the negotiating room, and the new deal actually reversed the central and laudable aim of the RSPT – that is, reducing the tax burden on start-up operations, which are penalised by the state royalties because the impost is paid when production starts, rather than after the company actually begins to make a profit. The success of the multinational miners in securing these concessions, and in beating voters to the punch, reveals the perverse world order in which we live: an advanced country can possess enormous riches but lack the capacity to do what is clearly in its own long-term interest…
Not only did the miners change the prime minister and change government policy, they went on to brag about how their coup had stopped similar schemes from spreading around the world…
Exactly one week after Gillard announced the compromise, Rio Tinto’s American chief executive, Tom Albanese, told a group of mining executives in London that the Australian experience should send a salutary message to governments around the world. Governments should ‘learn a lesson’ from the episode, he declared. A few months later, Xstrata’s chief executive, Peter Freyberg, was still bragging…
BHP’s executives managed to avoid bragging, although this company did more than any other to bring down the tax and Kevin Rudd. The total cost of the campaign was $22 million. The Minerals Council of Australia, which is largely funded by the big three companies, spent $17.2 million, while BHP spent $4.2 million on its own and Rio $537,000. Cabinet ministers in the Gillard government say that Geoff Walsh delivered the Mitchelmore research directly to the then ALP national secretary, Karl Bitar. These claims are strenuously denied by Walsh. But the BHP research is understood to have panicked the Labor heavyweights, prompting them to move against Rudd even though he still had a commanding 4 percentage point lead in the national newspoll.
If it is true that former ALP national secretary Karl Bitar, in cahoots with Gillard and Swan, acted to overthrow a prime minister on the basis of private research data provided directly to him by BHP, a foreign-owned company demonstrably seeking to change government policy, then this is more evidence of treason on the part of key figures in the ALP.
Gillard, Swan, and Bitar should be in jail.
UPDATE:
Peter Martin has more, in the Age today:
Gathered on one side of the cabinet table were the newly-installed Prime Minister Julia Gillard, her Treasurer Wayne Swan and her Resources Minister Martin Ferguson. On the other were the heads of Australia’s three big mining companies: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.
As the then Treasury head Ken Henry later told a Senate committee: “We were not involved in the negotiations, other than in respect of crunching the numbers if you like and in providing due diligence on design parameters that the mining companies themselves came up with.”
Gillard and Swan consciously chose not only to exclude the locally-owned miners from the negotiations. They also chose to exclude Treasury officials – folks who just might have more of a clue than a dodgy lawyer and a career political hack with an arts degree – as well.
Conclusion? Gillard and Swan did not want any intelligent outside scrutiny of the BHP-drafted deal.
Hence their persistent “commercial-in-confidence” response cited ever since, in attempted justification of their refusal to let the details come out.
Quelle surprise!
A stunning revelation emerges.
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Miners hoard credits to avoid resources tax
Mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton have built up a combined arsenal of $1.7 billion in tax credits that can be offset against future mining tax liabilities.
Exactly as predicted here on this blog, way back in December 2011 (GilSwan Conned – Mining Tax The Greens’ Pit of Despair)
Note well how the “progressive” (ie, international socialist) SMH follows the ALP (ie, international socialist) party line, by immediately switching the focus of this awful tale of inequity away from international companies, and onto an evil billionaire “Tall Poppy”.
Local Aussie miner, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest:
And billionaire miner Andrew Forrest confirmed to Fairfax Media that his iron ore company, Fortescue Metals, would not be paying any tax under the Gillard government’s minerals resource rent tax this year.
Mr Forrest, who challenged Treasurer Wayne Swan’s claim that the tax would still raise billions in revenue for the government after being watered down during [exclusive] negotiations [by Gillard and Swan] with [foreign-owned multinational giants] Rio, BHP and Xstrata, appears to have been vindicated after Mr Swan’s admission that the tax has net a paltry $126 million in the six months to December 31.
”The record stands for itself,” Mr Forrest said.
And to make sure you do not miss the underlying propaganda message – that the real “evil” here is your fellow Aussie-made-good entrepreneur – the SMH chooses to headline the article with a photo of Mr Forrest.Not with one of the foreign-owned BHP, RIO, or Xstrata chief executives.
Wayne Swan would be pleased (The Galactic Hypocrisy of Wayne Swan ; Swan’s Anti-Australian Rant A Smokescreen For Treason).
While the focus has been on the dramatic shortfall in mining tax collections compared to original Treasury projections of more than $10 billion over four years, the most recent financial accounts of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton show the two miners have built up $1.1 billion and $637 million in tax credits respectively.
The credits did not reduce the amount of company income tax they had to pay, but can be carried forward to offset future mining tax liabilities.
Just as predicted here.
Speaking of credit, we should give credit to the SMH for devoting one (1) whole paragraph to a misleading and deceptive recognition of the fact that the vomitous Wayne Swan singled out Aussie miners like Twiggy Forrest for exclusive vilification while belching out his galactically hypocritical smokescreen for treason:
Mr Forrest’s recent MRRT brawl with the government has seen him subjected to criticism from Mr Swan – part of which was his inclusion in the ”badly behaving billionaires” club that included Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart. Sources have said that Mr Swan included Mr Forrest as a member of the billionaires in an essay in The Monthly – against the urging of his advisers.
Misleading and deceptive?
Yes.
In seeking to further the progressive (internationalist) agenda – in this case, through minimising damage to the PR image of huge multinational oligopolies, while enabling damage to the public image of successful local/national enterprises by invoking “Tall Poppy” syndrome – the SMH propagates the old revolutionary socialist strategy of “class warfare”. And conveniently neglects to inform readers of the full picture.
You have to find that, at blogs like this.
Indeed, you have to read right down to the last two paragraphs of the SMH article to gain even an inkling of the truth – though of course, it is still not explicitly spelled out:
The major mining companies are loath to talk about the tax that they negotiated with the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and Mr Swan. They have kept their heads below the parapet this week as Mr Swan has been in the firing line.
The government has responded to the attack by suggesting various changes to the tax but the prospect of a big overhaul before the election is unlikely. The campaign by BHP, Rio and Xstrata that led to the super profits tax being replaced with the more benign MRRT was so potent that Ms Gillard will not take them on again over the next seven months.
Remember, the article is headlined with a generic “Miners hoard credits…” title. And a photo of Aussie miner, Twiggy Forrest.
Only the fully alert and informed reader, one who knows that BHP, RIO, and Xstrata are majority foreign-owned multinational giants, is likely to note the above bolded words at the very end.
And possibly, just possibly, have a dawning realisation that something fishy … something against the best interests of Australians … is the real truth behind this story.
UPDATE:
Too late, Independent Andrew Wilkie wakes up and smells the coffee; says Andrew Forrest was right –
Mr Wilkie told Fairfax Media that he had been wrong to believe Treasury predictions of company liabilities under the renegotiated tax instead of the alternative arguments put forward at the time by Mr Forrest.
Mr Forrest had complained that the compromise to allow miners to write off the long-term value of assets from their mining tax liabilities had allowed the big three miners off the hook.
”It is beyond argument that the government was wrong, is wrong, and Andrew Forrest is right,” he said.
For readers who have not read my earlier posts on this topic, the key point to understand from the above is this: A major reason why the redesigned mining tax favours the multinationals – unsurprising, since they designed it, in secret, with Gillard and Swan – is that the Big 3 miners have vast existing assets. Their redesigned tax allows them to write off the “market value” of their existing projects, and thus claim credits against any MRRT liabilities.
UPDATE 2:
Via Andrew Bolt’s blog:
Wayne Swan specialises on perhaps this government’s defining characteristic – to meet argument with personal abuse. And there is no fouler example than this – Swan accusing miner Twiggy Forrest in 2011 of being a tax dodger for warning of exactly the flaw that has made Swan’s mining tax a colossal flop:
Wayne Swan has accused mining magnate Andrew ‘’Twiggy’’ Forrest of trying to avoid paying tax, describing as ‘’bunkum’’ new analysis suggesting the world’s biggest miners would get a free ride under Labor’s mining tax..
Mr Forrest said new analysis by accounting firm BDO revealed Treasury forecasts of an $11 billion budget boost from the MRRT were an ‘’absolute fiction’’.
EXACTLY what I argued back in 2011. A mining tax, designed by the Big 3 foreign-owned multinationals, behind closed doors, with the local miners locked out, in cahoots with the traitorous Gillard and Swan, one that enables the Big 3 to increase their oligopoly over the Australian mining industry, at the expense of far smaller, locally-owned competitors.
And claim tax credits and deductions for doing so.
According to the betting markets, the papabile front-runner to replace Pope Benedict and so become “Peter the Roman” – aka the Last Pope – is Cardinal Peter Turkson.
Cardinal Turkson wants to reform the international financial system.
How?
By the creation of a Global Public Authority and a Global Bank:
The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises.
The wet dream of every one world ruler aspirant.
Oh dear.
Unsurprising.
After all, the bankers are ‘doing god’s work‘.
Just don’t ask “Which god?“.
“There’s a small French book, ‘In Praise Of Treason’, where they prove that treason is part and parcel of politics. To succeed, you have to lie. If you say what you think, no one will vote for you.”
A few facts.
Courtesy of the RBA and the ABS.
Australia’s Gross Foreign Liabilities: $2.2 Trillion
Australia’s Net Foreign Debt: $750 Billion
Australia’s Net Income Deficit: $11 – $14 Billion per quarter
Youth unemployment rate (15-19yo): 24.5%
Got that?
Our Foreign Liabilities are over $2 Trillion. We owe 3/4 of a Trillion dollars in debts to foreigners. As a nation, in terms of trade with the rest of the world we are going backwards at a rate of between $11 and $14 Billion every 3 months. And a quarter of our young people are unemployed.
Now, to the picture of our debt-driven future. Be sure to watch it. With your eyes open.
via Zero Hedge (bold in original, my underline added):
The following rather stunning documentary provides a critical insight into what Europe (and Argentina once again) could well be progressing towards. There is a reason we highlight the ‘scariest chart in Europe’ as that of youth unemployment and with the central banks printing money at ever increasing paces and the next round of global competitive devaluation beginning, the debt slaves will suffer ever more. In 2001, Argentina collapsed; after many years of apathy in the country, the insurrection exploded. As TopDocumentary notes, the spontaneous revolt of ‘faceless’ people meant saucepans were being banged in every neighborhood.
What happened to Argentina? How was it possible that in so rich a country so many people were hungry? The country had been ransacked by a new form of aggression, committed in time of peace and in a democracy. A daily and silent violence that caused greater social disruption, more emigration and death than the terrorism of the dictatorship and the Falkland Islands war.
Ever since independence, almost 200 years ago, Argentina’s foreign debt has been a source of impoverishment and corruption and the biggest scandals. Since the first loan negotiated by Rivadavia in 1824 with the British Bank Baring Brothers, the debt was used to enrich Argentinean financiers, to control the finances and empty the country of its wealth.
This foreign debt always went hand in hand with big business, and with the complicity of nearly every government, from Miter and Quintana to Menem and De la Rua. The policy of indebtedness gave rise in Argentina to generations of technocrats and bureaucrats, who favored banks and international corporations over their own country. Educated at Harvard, Chicago, Oxford or Buenos Aires, their portraits hang in the official galleries.
Sound familiar?
Our own generations of technocrats and bureaucrats have long favoured banks and international corporations over our own country.
Exhibit A: our foreign debt-financed, world-leading housing bubble. Enslaving and impoverishing millions. For the benefit of the government-guaranteed, record profit-making Big 4 banks (that is, for the benefit of their Top 4 majority foreign shareholders, in particular, HSBC, JP Morgan, and Citicorp).
Exhibit B: the mining sector. And the so-called “mining super profits tax” in particular. A classic example of treason – yes, treason – by our own politicians (see Swan’s Anti-Australian Rant A Smokescreen For Treason ). For the exclusive benefit of 3 monolithic, majority foreign-owned international corporations.
Here’s another picture of our debt-driven future. Courtesy of the world famous investor, Warren Buffet.
In just a few minutes, it neatly drums home a little known reality. That our own “little island” has, for many decades, been on the same path depicted in Mr Buffet’s clever little cartoon.
This IS Australia:
“Treason has phenomenal political power, precisely because it’s treason. It’s insidious, it sneaks up behind you, without warning, where you least expect it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be treason.”
Back in April 2010, I joined with and supported Professor Steve Keen on his week-long Keenwalk to Kosciuszko. For readers who don’t know, Steve is one of just 13 economists worldwide who foresaw and forewarned of the GFC. Indeed, Steve won the 2010 Revere Award as voted by his peers, for being the economist who first warned of the impending crisis and (more importantly) the one who most cogently explained the reasons why.
For some time now, Steve has been working to develop a new computer program for modelling economics. It is called “Minsky”, in honour of the economist Hyman Minsky. Yes, that’s him, in the cartoon above. He developed the Financial Instability Hypothesis, which essentially recognised that lengthy periods of economic stability are actually a cause of subsequent instability and crisis. It was Minsky who famously coined the phrase “Stability is destabilising”.
Steve’s “Minsky” computer program is revolutionary.
How so?
Well – believe it or not – it is the first economic modelling program that actually includes the role of banks, money, and debt.
Seriously.
Mainstream economists – including all those overpaid “experts” in the world’s treasury departments and central banks – failed to see the crisis coming.
But you already know that. What you may not know is the reason why. And that reason is simply this.
The mainstream economic theories (thus, models) they all believe in … ignore the role of banks, money, and debt.
You really can’t make this $h!t up.
Steve wants to change all that. He wants to give the world the tools needed to properly model the real world economy. Not an imaginary one. Because in the real world, banks money and debt all matter. A lot.
To make this happen – to revolutionise economics – well, sad to say, it requires money. Money to hire not just one or two part-timers, but a team of full-time computer programmers.
So, to raise money for this project, Steve has launched a campaign on the well known fundraising website called Kickstarter.
Please visit the campaign page here –
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2123355930/minsky-reforming-economics-with-visual-monetary-mo
I want to encourage you to take 2 minutes to watch Steve’s introductory video. If nothing else, it will entertain and educate you. And if you really want to be educated – in (mostly) no nonsense, layman’s language – take the time to read what Steve has to say on his Kickstarter campaign page.
Then, if you feel that this is a worthy project … I certainly do! … then please, make a pledge.
As little as $2. Because every dollar helps.
And please share the links to Steve’s Kickstarter campaign on your own blog, Facebook page, Twitter, and other social networks.
Your simply spreading the word will be a great help, and a wonderful support.
Thank you.
Lots.
P.S.
The Economist recently had a feature on “Economics after the Crisis” called “New Model Army” which featured Minsky as an example of what the future of economics could be:
In Australia Steve Keen, an economist, and Russell Standish, a computational scientist, are developing a software package that would allow anyone to create and play with models of the economy that incorporate some of these new ideas. Called “Minsky”—after Hyman Minsky, an American economist celebrated for his work on boom-and-bust financial cycles—it places the banking system at the centre of the economy. (The Economist, January 19th 2013, p. 68)
Oh dear.
The way things are going, your humble Cassandra may be forced out of retirement.
Just to say “I told you so” and “Uh huh, here it comes, folks”.
Superannuation is in the news. Lots of news.
There’s two “angles” to this super news.
Firstly, the obscene largesse manifest in the retirement benefits enjoyed by politicians (and public servants) at the taxpayers’ expense. For life. Tax free.
Secondly, the hot new story (long predicted at this blog) that these same politicians, not content with leeching off the public throughout their sordid lives of so-called “public service” before retiring to quieter lives of richly undeserved luxury, are … surprise surprise … looking to dip their greedy fingers into your super savings. Why? Well, if for no other reason than that the miserable vermin simply can’t balance a budget, for love nor (borrowed) money.
Let’s resist the temptation to immediately launch into a completely justifiable rage-filled rant on the first “angle”, and begin with a look at the second.
Former regular readers of this little blog will doubtless recall the many proffered warnings that both the Labor and Liberal parties – henceforth to be known as the “Laboral Party” – have their eyes firmly set on stealing your super. Indeed, their plans are well advanced to do just that –
Stealing Our Super: I DARE You To Ignore This Now
Labor Begins To Steal Your Super
It Has Begun – Labor Steals Liberal’s Idea To Steal Your Super
That was back in 2011. There’s more where they came from (see “Search” function at top right of this page).
The latest news revolves around speculation that the Labor(al) Party would like to fiddle the tax system with intent to grab a larger chunk of “wealthy” Australians superannuation when they retire. Here’s Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen:
Treasury and the politicians are canvassing the taxing of those with superannuation fund balances of over $1 million, forgetting that the $1 million, if invested in bank deposits, would yield only $38,000 in income.
Retiring Attorney General Nicola Roxon’s parliamentary superannuation is worth at least $10 million but she would not be taxed under the proposal being canvassed because her pension (like that of senior public servants) is virtually free so it is not declared “middle class welfare”.
To tax unfortunates who receive no ‘free’ money but set hard earned cash aside to fund their retirement via superannuation, but are now struggling, is simply grossly unfair.
Note well, that was “Treasury and the politicians”. Let’s not forget that arguably the greatest rort of all is not so-called “middle class welfare”. It is UPPER class welfare. And upper class welfare goes largely to the quietly swelling hordes of “public servants”, such as those aforementioned Treasury officials. Here’s The Australian’s Adam Creighton a week ago:
A more blatant example of upper-class welfare is found in Canberra, among the bloated senior ranks of the public service. Thousands are paid exorbitant sums grossly disproportionate to the social value of their output. Taxpayers lavish salaries between $200,000 and $750,000 a year on almost 2900 senior public servants. Another 13,230 are paid about $150,000 a year.
Whole suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne pay tax to support this artificial, taxpayer-created upper class, whose incomes dwarf similarly employed public servants in London and Washington DC.
And that is just their incomes. Their superannuation “entitlements” (what a multi-faceted word that is, for politicians!) are equally scandalous. Here’s Robert Gottliebsen last year:
Former superannuation minister Nick Sherry has blown the lid on Australia’s greatest rort, the $210 billion unfunded public sector defined benefit superannuation schemes.
The Canberra public service beneficiaries of this rort are often the very people who are attacking legitimate savers in the private sectors who put money aside to pay for their retirement.
…it is outrageous that “protected” public servants should be plotting against private savers whose level of retirement savings depends on investment returns.
And at that time, many others including The Australian’s David Crowe weighed in:
Labor’s budget strike on wealthy Australians has opened a hornet’s nest of inequity, as politicians, senior public servants and judges are spared the full force of changes that will raise $2.5 billion from superannuation.
The Gillard government scrambled to clarify its tax plans late yesterday as experts slammed the measures for hurting workers trying to save for their retirement without imposing the same penalties on others.
As the Coalition accused Labor of waging “class warfare” with its budget handouts, industry groups declared it unfair to extract tax revenue from superannuation in ways that could not be levied equally on everyone earning the same income.
Indeed.
The latest round of speculation about the Laboral Party dipping their hands into private citizens’ retirement savings has culminated in the usual scramble of hastily issued denials and butt-covering. But make no mistake, the real war between the ruling class and We The People over superannuation will not go away:
Julia Gillard’s move yesterday to rule out taxes on income from superannuation balances over $1 million may have cut off one new revenue raising option for the May budget, but like a hydra-headed monster, other options to milk the $1.4 trillion industry are set to emerge.
The possibilities now under consideration include new taxes on contributions for higher income earners and a possible increase in the 15 per cent tax on investments in superannuation.
But the increasing anger over the past week at the prospect of a tax on withdrawals on superannuation funds worth more than $1m, or even a mooted $800,000, highlights the political risks of the government’s persistent meddling…
Now here’s the thing. One of the reasons this is a hot story in the media, is because it is controversial. It plays beautifully into the “Us vs Them” false paradigm that is the heart of social engineering. And on more than one level.
It’s not just the broader public “Us” versus the smaller political class “Them”.
The media (and so, much of the public) have engaged in a hot debate about low-middle-income “Us” versus high-income-earning “Them”.
On more considered inspection, what I am seeing is the slow rise and rise of yet another false paradigm. One that I think is perhaps even more insidious than the old revolutionary standbys, the “workers vs capitalists”, “proletariat vs bourgousie”, and “people vs politicians”.
What I am seeing is a new variation on the theme. Generation X + Y + Z “we don’t have much super yet” “Us” … versus Baby Boomer “those bastards DO have a lot of super” “Them”.
In other words, what we are seeing being fostered here is inter-generational warfare.
It is another very useful weapon in the armoury of social engineers, with which to bring about the “social revolution” needed to usher in their self-serving dystopian fantasies. It is a subtle weapon that works in exactly the same way as “female empowerment” and “same-sex equality” … by creating and fostering a false paradigm of social dis-harmony and division.
I’ve been seeing the same basic argument raised all over the news comments and financial blogosphere, by poor downtrodden oppressed (note, sarcasm) Gen X-Y-Zers like your humble blogger – that tax concessions on superannuation for “wealthy” baby boomers should be withdrawn. A common argument being bandied about is that “Sure, $1million may only represent $38K per annum and that’s not much to live on in retirement, BUT that is calculated by NOT drawing down the principal; those greedy, lazy Baby Boomers should be calculating their superannuation drawdowns so they are stony broke when they kick the bucket.”
I take issue with that rationale.
Once upon a time, it was … scary old-fashioned word coming up … traditional, for adults of the species to aspire to leave an inheritance for their children. And for society to consider such aspirations admirable, and conducive to social stability.
(Indeed, our very own Laboral Party politicians all solemnly proclaim that they want a free and independent society of self-reliant individuals, and that they wholeheartedly support the noble and worthy aspiration to succeed in life, save, and so be able to support oneself in retirement, and so NOT become a burden on the taxpayer. Until they start running out of other people’s money to squander, that is. Then, you are magically and instantly transformed, by the power of self-serving political “necessity”, into an evil “wealthy” person who needs to be taxed more, in order for society to be made more “fair” and “equitable”)
No longer is it fashionable, indeed conscionable, to leave an inheritance for your children, or so it seems. Now, in these modern advanced times, such notions are deplorable. Calculate your entire wealth to the last penny, and make sure you die penniless. Ungrateful offspring be damned.
I do wonder whether those same Gen X-Y-Zers who are eagerly falling for the “greedy Baby Boomers” inter-generational-warfare-as-tool-of-social-revolution-and-control nonsense, and want to see their parents’ retirement savings taxed harder, have really thought this thing through.
But I digress.
What I am most interested in is the obscene, unconscionable hypocrisy of the ruling class in this country.
The politicians, of every bent.
And the armada of “senior public servants” who really run the country.
So, rather than wading into the inter-generational warfare trap that others so readily fall into, let us retain our love of each other, our parents, and our friends’ parents.
And look instead to the real enemy.
Those #&^%$! on the telly –
Retiring MP’s have income for life
Nicola Roxon will leave parliament with a six-figure pension.
The former attorney-general and former Senate Leader Chris Evans will each be rewarded in their political retirement with incomes more than $50,000 above the average wage.
Ms Roxon could receive more than $120,000 a year for life, while Mr Evans’ pension could exceed $140,000 a year.
Barnaby Is Right 
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