Angus Taylor and Jane Hume vow to return party to lower tax roots
Updated ,first published
The coalition’s new leadership will seek to restore the reputation of a party with lower taxes and better economic managers after former leader Peter Dutton rejected tax cuts proposals before the last election.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor and MP Jane Hume said on Sunday they wanted to return their party to its roots and leave the door open to budget cuts by reprioritising improving productivity.
The pair held the shadow treasury and finance portfolios at the last election, when the Peter Dutton-led Coalition opposed Labor’s marginal tax cut and suggested the money be spent on defense instead. After Taylor ousted former leader Sussan Ley on Friday, she quickly admitted the policy was a mistake and began to change course.
“All Liberals instinctively know that the Liberal Party must and must always be a lower-tax party, because we know that when taxes are low, Australians have a chance to get ahead,” Jane Hume told the ABC. insider Sunday. “We know that when taxes are low, the economy grows without creating inflation.”
In his first news conference as leader on Friday, Taylor described the lack of tax cuts as a bad call and said on Sunday that the best way to raise money was through an inflation-free, fast-growing economy.
Asked about Dutton’s decision to oppose Labour’s tax cut, Taylor said: “I have suggested a way forward with lowering personal income taxes and that is something I have already put on record.”
“We need to convince Australians that we will be the party of lower taxes and that we will take a strong, strong policy package into the next election,” Taylor told Sky News separately.
“We’re seeing personal income taxes go up under Labor. So they keep cutting personal income taxes. Well, okay, we made a mistake in the election campaign. But let me tell you, when inflation runs rampant – and when it rises, as it did under this desperate treasurer – people pay more tax as a fraction of their income,” he said.
Taylor said he has always advocated for lower taxes. Columnist Niki Savva reported that Taylor and Hume wanted to propose their own tax cuts, as opposed to the surprise $5-a-week tax cut Albanese announced in last year’s March budget. According to Savva, Dutton was not interested in Taylor’s plan to offer guaranteed tax refunds to those forced into a higher tax bracket by inflation.
Taylor also denied trying to undermine Ley while he was at the forefront.
“I have tried every day to be a supporter of his leadership,” Taylor told Sky News. “We got to the point where the view of the party room (was) going to have to be reset.”
While Taylor and Hume were reluctant to detail policy so soon after taking control of the party on Sunday, Hume said they would oppose any plan to reduce the capital gains tax credit; This was something neither Chancellor of the Exchequer Jim Chalmers nor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ruled out.
This imprint has revealed that the government is considering cuts to the CGT concession as part of a wider tax reform package aimed at helping young Australians buy their own homes.
“This discussion has been going on in the party room for several months,” Hume said. “Whether it’s a change to negative gearing, whether it’s a change to the capital gains tax… Liberals instinctively know when we talk to each other that we’re a party for lower taxes, and that if you tax something, there’ll be less of it.”
“If you tax residential housing, it will be less. That would be a disaster. No one has yet demonstrated that a wholesale change to the capital gains tax on residential housing would create more housing or provide more rental opportunities for rental homes for those who haven’t yet bought their first home.”
Hume did not commit to any tax reform but acknowledged that “more of the same is clearly not good enough.”
“I will not do politics,” he said as he ran away on Sunday morning, 48 hours after becoming deputy leader. “Angus Taylor and I will instinctively always say that low taxes are better than high taxes and that they are better for all Australians.”
Hume, who would choose his portfolio, foreshadowed an economic role.
“I’m particularly interested in making sure that I have the opportunity to talk about what’s important to me, which allows us to have a much more productive economy,” he said.
Albanese attacked the new Coalition line-up on Sunday, saying his government would deliver in July the $5 weekly tax cut it promised at the last election and next year: “After Angus Taylor led the charge to not only assume but say that if he had not been elected treasurer at the election less than a year ago, he would have introduced legislation that would actually increase taxes for all 14 million Australians.”
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Brittany Busch is the federal politics correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
