The Turnbull government is preparing to abandon serious tax reform.

It has ruled out major change in favour of a pair of savings measures seen as politically safe: curbing the excessive use of negative gearing by wealthy investors, and reducing extensive parking of pre-tax income in superannuation accounts.

The minimalist reform approach would raise sufficient funds to offer marginal tax relief to middle-income earners while also freeing the government to prosecute a massive scare campaign against Labor, claiming its negative gearing policies would smash the economy, wiping $278 billion off the national balance sheet through a 5 per cent plunge in housing values.

The government's final package, due to be presented within weeks, will not restrict negative gearing to new houses, as Labor has proposed, but merely impose caps on the dollar amount of losses claimable, while also reducing the amount able to be directed into superannuation contributions.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/turnbull-walks-away-from-tax-reform-only-caps-on-super-negative-gearing-left-20160224-gn2i13.html#ixzz417eKVSpz 
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"As Australia's third-oldest prime minister, if you are still prime minister after the election, will you serve a full term in parliament or will you retire to your unit in New York and do a switcheroo with the member for Warringah [Tony Abbott], sustaining yourself with innovation and growth opportunities your investments have provided for the people of the Cayman Islands? It has never been a more exciting time to be a Cayman Islander! Are you a seat warmer?"

Adding to the sense of the surreal, it sounded like Palmer was calling them the "Clayman Islands," and there he was, chuckling along with himself as he asked the question, as if even he thought the whole exercise ridiculous.

Malcolm Turnbull handled it with good humour: "I thank the honourable member for his question. If he had not found it so amusing as to be laughing right through it, we might have been able to hear most of it. Nonetheless, I gather the honourable member is inquiring about my health. I thank him for his interest and I can assure him I am in the very best of form."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/clive-smells-a-deal-as-turnbull-fails-to-make-captains-call-20160226-gn4p0l.html#ixzz41MOq0SLD
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Hum... not a bad assessment from Clive who helped Abbott's disastrous "direct action" policy see the light of day after Clive had said something like "over my dead body"... Clive is knowledgeable about switcheroos. So why would Turnbull replace Abbott and sell us the same crap?

The simple answer here is that Abbott was NOT RE-ELECTABLE. The electorate could smell the stench of idiocy permeating the landscape. So in Clive's clever mind, he can smell a dead rat: Turnbull takes over till the next election because Turnbull IS ELECTABLE while Abbott is not, then Turnbull and Abbott do a switcheroo and Turnbull retires to his own pastures.

Machiavellian? You can't get pass the Libs (CONservatives) for pulling tricks like that, those that have now seen Brough being booted out of politics...

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/28643

 

Bob Ellis questions the absence of opinion polls reporting Bill Shorten's newfound success and PM Malcolm Turnbull's rapidly declining popularity. 

A SILENCE HAS fallen over the events of last week — and it is the silence of the polls.

No poll has put Shorten ahead, which is where he is. But where is the Ipsos? The Essential? The Newspoll?

Where, moreover, is the approval rating of the Treasurer? Of the Minister for Immigration? Of Bishop as Foreign Minister versus Plibersek or Carr? Of Joyce as Member for New England versus Tony Windsor, who will take the seat from him?

Newspoll will do one its "paradoxical" wheezes next, I reckon. Paradoxically, the swing is to Turnbull, Newspoll will claim. It always does that. Counter-intuitively. Unexpectedly. Surprise, surprise.

I think Bill Shorten may have been seriously underestimated
He has seen off the GST hike
Wiping the floor with Turnbull on negative gearing

— Bruce Ross (@brucerossbrc) February 25, 2016

The facts, however, are exact and immoveable. Morrison has no credibility as a manager of money or an advocate of self-sacrifice. O”Dwyer is a joke. Turnbull says cheaper housing for young Australians would be a national catastrophe. He mistakes a home-craving nation for a hungry swarm of real estate speculators moved only by money. Bishop is threatening war with China. Pyne is up to his neck in what Brough and Ashby did, illegally, to Slipper. Dutton continues to torment children and pregnant raped women here and overseas.

And the polls will continue to put Turnbull ahead of Shorten — and show two million people who don’t want him as Prime Minister voting for him.

Soon now, one or other of them will print the truth and put Labor ahead.

I wonder which one it will be.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-silence-of-the-polls,8727

 

Meanwhile, some news items are trying to destroy Carr without any other foundation that he shook hand with a Chinese...

From political appointments to the Safe Schools review and the hyperbolic negative gearing reaction, you can forget about a progressive Malcolm Turnbull. What we're getting is Abbott Mark II, writes Mungo MacCallum.

Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and their armies of orcs have won.

For months, years even, they inveighed against Malcolm Turnbull, swearing mighty oaths that he must never become prime minister.

They formed barricades around their hero, Tony Abbott, assuring their devotees that his reign would endure forever - the hordes of the moderates and their reviled leader were vanquished, destroyed, razed from the surface of the earth.

And even when he was treacherously, sacrilegiously, overthrown by his own fallen angels and the Antichrist was installed, Abbott remained, in the eyes of his followers, immortal: not only would his works and memory endure forever, but he would eventually be resurrected. He was their rex quondam futurus - their once and future king.

And so it has come to pass. Malcolm Turnbull as we knew him has all but vanished; in a political sense, it could be said that he has been destroyed. Instead, we have a sort of Abbott avatar - smoother, more articulate, even more plausible, but still undeniably the essence of the previous prime minister. Not only have just about all the old Abbott policies been retained, but new ones - the sort that might have sprung, fully formed, from the head of the precursor - have emerged.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-29/maccallum-turnbull-morphs-into-abbott/7207866