In Auspol election world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and scare campaigns around death taxes. Liberal and Labor are fighting over the issue very publicly this morning, and it’s been turning a bit silly.
To recap, this comes after online misinformation at the 2019 election that wrongly claimed Labor would bring in an inheritance tax, unkindly called a “death tax”.
This time around, the campaign is far more front-facing, with the government pointing to opposition leader Anthony Albanese’s comments from 1991 proposing an inheritance tax when he was assistant general secretary of NSW Labor.
The government is blasting social media with graphics showing a laundry list of “higher taxes” they claim Albanese has supported.
Labor has mocked the Coalition for digging so far back in the archives, and Albanese jokingly tried to table in parliament a 1981 university essay he wrote as an economics student.
On Tuesday, the Australian Financial Review reported that Liberal MP Jason Falinski said “the people who aren’t paying tax are the people inheriting their money”, adding it was “problematic” that “more and more money is being accumulated by lazy capital”.
It was published under the headline “Liberal MP backs higher inheritance taxes”.
But just hours after the story was published, Falinski tweeted “Never have, never will support an inheritance tax. And anyone who knows me knows that I am strongly in favour of lower taxes not higher taxes.”
Labor’s shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers ruled out taking an inheritance tax to the election, telling ABC’s Radio National “absolutely not, of course we are not introducing a tax of that kind.”
He mocked the furore over Falinski’s comments:
“[Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg can’t even organise a decent scare campaign without the wheels falling off it. It is ridiculous.
He later took a printout of the AFR’s front page to a press conference, brandishing it to accuse Frydenberg of an “unhinged and dishonest scare campaign”.
The only major party who says that the problem that needs to be dealt with here with a death tax is the Liberal party.
Guardian Australia asked if he’d read Albanese’s 1981 essay, titled “The Neoclassical Theory of the Competitive Market System”.
Chalmers replied “very sharp essay, very neatly written.”
“It was very impressive.”
