Printing

• Among last year’s winners were said to be single parents, renters and first home buyers.
• It’s also how we talk about tax: winners and losers.
• It’s part of a way of thinking and reporting that makes changes that could actually help us all but impossible.

Confessions of a gun for hire

• What would matter would be the immediate “overnight” estimates of who would win and who would lose.
• So, presumably with a heavy heart, Henry developed a computer model that spat out nothing more than immediate winners and losers and ignored what the changes would do to Australia over the longer term.

Winners and losers are (almost) beside the point

• Henry says looking back it is easy to understand “why we did what we did”.
• He says Hewson’s package was a genuine attempt to break out of the winners and losers mindset and argue for changes on the basis they would benefit society.

‘A conspiracy against future Australians’

• They tell us the thing that matters most, making Australia work better, can’t really be spoken about.
• Here’s what Henry says really matters, and what he says he tried to address in his 2009 tax review.
• The things we ought to avoid taxing are income from work, the normal rates of return for businesses, and transactions.

What’s winning matters as much as who’s winning

• I’ll still report on winners and losers next month, but I’ll also aim to go deeper – to report on what’s winning as well as who.
• Read more:
  Former treasury head Ken Henry says we need 'big bang' tax reform rather than incremental change

Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.