We tax income — wages — massively. Wealth and assets? Lightly.

Ironic given the LNP’s comments about lifters and learners. If you are sitting back leaning with wealth, you pay fuck all tax. If you (lift) work for a living you pay through the nose.

All the hot air about stage 3 tax cuts would have been better saved for a debate on negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts and broad based land taxes. Can’t shift land offshore to dodge tax.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Our tax system does a lot: paying for education, health care and a safety net that makes Australia a great place to live.

The Albanese government made changes to the scheme — something also contentious because Labor had promised not to — that lowered the benefits at the top end and increased them at the middle and bottom.

Australia doesn’t have separate “social security” taxes, and our superannuation system of enforced saving is another element of difference.

What it’s created is a system that gives preferential treatment to income from assets — such as housing and trusts — and taxes wages more heavily.

Mr Coates says we can’t continue to ignore the problem, detailing a “structural budget deficit” of about $50 billion a year, or 2 per cent of our gross domestic product (GDP, or the value of the goods and services Australia creates).

She is the president of Prosper Australia, a longstanding think-tank that wants to shift the burden of taxes away from “income and productivity” and onto land, natural resources and what she calls “monopoly rents” — where there’s a lack of competition that pushes up prices.

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