The changing redistributional role of taxation in Australia since federation

Smith, Julie P

The changing redistributional role of taxation in Australia since federation

Date

2002

Authors

Smith, Julie P

Abstract

Despite the distinctiveness of Australia’s tax transfer system and its ‘wage earners’ welfare state approach to social protection, it is unclear what redistributional role taxation has played and why it evolved the way it did. Understanding how governments managed redistribution in a federal system can provide historical insights of value for current policymaking. This thesis investigates how the redistribution role of taxation has changed in Australia since Federation, how it was affected by economic change and fluctuations, and how it was influenced by Australia’s institutions of social protection and federal finance. Key findings are: ▪ The redistributional role of Australia’s tax system over the past century was shaped by economic integration and structural change, and by economic shocks. War was the occasion not the cause of the change. ▪ Australia’s federal financial arrangements became increasing incongruent with economic and social integration during the interwar years. Income tax centralisation and horizontal equalisation were both responses to this problem. ▪ State Governments initiated mass income taxation to fund social protection during the depression: the Commonwealth followed precedent after 1942. ▪ Australia’s economic structure encouraged a system of financial social protection through taxation, its urban industries and primary producer finding common cause wit unions and welfare reformers who opposed contributory social insurance. Australia’s income tax approach to funding social security was probably more progressive. ▪ The trend to mass income taxation since the Depression made income tax less progressive in structure. Its progressive effect is now mainly through the level of revenue it raises for redistributive public spending programs. ▪ Earmarking taxes for social security programs us now uncommon, but was key political strategy supporting heavy income taxation. This may partly account for Australia’s relatively low tax/expenditure ranking among OECD countries. ▪ Unbalanced federal financing arrangements created tendencies – predicted before Federation – for ‘extravagant’ Commonwealth expenditures and ‘demoralised’ States. Restraining States’ public capital formation and encouraging reckless remission’ of Commonwealth income taxation and public consumption spending, such arrangements inflated the economic cost of reducing equality. ▪ Changing economic and demographic structures and vested industry interests also explain recent increases in Commonwealth tax subsidies such as for private health insurance, superannuation, infrastructure financing and capital gains. ▪ ‘Fiscal benefit confusion’ due to federal finance arrangements helps explain why Australia’s post –war taxation and public spending levels were comparatively meagre. Tax resistance is also explained by the wage earners’ see their taxes as paying for ‘benefits’ to others without market incomes, rather than as earmarked contributions enhancing their own individual social security entitlement. ▪ The tax system is a valuable form of social capital, but suffers from ‘free riders’ problems. ‘Fiscal termites’ like tax avoidance and harmful tax competition erode it. Community distrust that taxes are justly levied and usefully expended risks creating a future society of impoverished ‘rational fools’. ▪ Australian tax history suggests how nations might respond as globalisation and ‘fiscal termites’ threaten their role in social protection through causing a ‘tax crisis of the nation-state’.