Hockey's farewell speech: Negative gearing must go

What @THX was saying is that if a change like this was made, there would be tradeoffs and compromises so that by the end, the change would be meaningless. Take GST for example, it has been compromised from the start because the Democrats demanded that certain items be exempt. Second example: carbon pricing. Producers of "carbon" were charged a fee, the fee went to the government, who gave most of it to lower income earners as compensation for their electricity going up, the consumers gave that money to the producers. That's why the scheme was labelled a money-go-round and why that particular "reform" was meaningless. Pretty much any "reform" winds up with so many trade offs and compromises that it becomes meaningless.

 

@THX but widening the gst would be a reform?

 

If they raise gst to 15% then this is a reform. but I now understand what you mean. Hopefully the trade offs are a positive step forward.

 

Simply raising a tax is not reform.

 

That I agree with. It should apply to everything. One only need to look at the birth of the GST to see how compromises were made to even get it passed. It diluted the reform the GST brought.

 

@THX - GST was fudged at the outset - pensions/benefits were increased by more than 10% and then food, rent etc were exempted - so costs didn't increase by 10% (especially when you removed sales taxes which were in place on so many products anyway).

 

Exactly. It was necessary reform (especially the idiotic sales tax regime) but was crippled from the outset.