The lists governments 'have seized to keep you broke' goes on and on

doesn't time race by today marks the passing of the first third of the year and guess what you actually haven't finished paying your taxes yet it sounds awful doesn't it everything that you've earned from your daily graft so far this year is actually gone to pay your annual tax and let me tell you you ain't done yet the australian taxpayers alliance which is an excellent organization has done the numbers on just how much we working stiffs get to give the government every single year as a proportion of our pay packet as the report points out calculating income tax is as easy as visiting the ato website you punch in your salary and bang you know exactly how much tax you're up for but you see the tax system's worse than that the aussie workers are not only taxed on their income they're actually taxed on their spending their savings and sometimes they're even taxed on their taxes so here's a trigger warning for you sensitive types at home these figures will shock you and i hope they appall you too so you can get in touch with your member of parliament and tell them enough is enough let's take the average victorian worker who earned the 2019 average income of sixty three thousand four hundred and forty dollars now they cost their employer about an initial ten thousand or so in superannuation in payroll tax and other benefits so if you build that into a bundle the total government grab of the 73 000 is actually more than 40 grand now that's a whopping 55 tax rate so if you put that in another perspective you only need to work until the end of july before you actually stop paying the government and you start paying yourself yippee i can hear your chair only three more months to go and of course it gets work worse if you actually choose to do something you enjoy like smoking the average smoker coughs up no pun intended another 50 200 in tax and if you insure your home well you're actually going to pay tax in the form of stamp duties and then you're going to pay gst on the stamp duty tax that's a tax on a tax and don't get me started on alcohol taxes or de facto wealth taxes that are built into water and council rates we've got land tax and then there's those levies which are always temporary never permanent but they never seem to go away wow i wonder why well the list of opportunities that governments have seized to keep you broke goes on and on and on in total the taxpayers alliance has identified 125 separate taxes at the local state and federal levels and most of them are so sneaky you don't even realize the government has their grabby hands in your pocket for most of the year so if you're a working joe or josephine and wonder why you're struggling to keep your own budget in the black it's probably not you it's greedy government keeping you broke [Music] now for more on this i'm joined by emily dye from the australian taxpayers alliance emily thanks so much for your time tonight tell me how much work did you have to put in to to identify just how much tax australian workers are being hit up for oh man this has been quite the project it started out as i thought it would be 30 pages i get this done in a month and it actually turned out to be closer to 110 pages and it took me over six months to complete this report i actually did not realize just how much tax we pay in australia how many taxes there are so adding those up ended up being a lot more of a project than i was expecting well you identified 125 of these sneaky taxes now some of them are pretty obvious right you you know you've got a wealth tax built into your water bill or your income tax and stuff but what did you how far deep did you have to get in to uncover the whole 125 of them and what are some of the sneakier ones yeah so henry tax review um was the one that actually originally found that 125 number uh it is actually quite difficult to find those find those taxes you look at revenue government revenues then they have the section that says other and we don't know what that is some good examples are insurance taxes you think that the australian government would want us buying insurance so that the government doesn't have to come in and bail us out when something bad happens but we're taxing insurance and all of these sales taxes like the insurance tax were supposed to go away with gst but instead we've got again that tax on a tax with the insurance taxes where first you pay the gst and then you have to pay the insurance tax on top of it um same thing happens with customs duties since there's all of these taxes on tax as a result of gst and these things not getting repealed and it's crazy every time we hear about discussion about tax reform it's always been about increasing taxes effectively like for example we have a stamp duty on on homes which is outrageous quite frankly and stops people moving into appropriate homes but the government wants to the new south wales government and other governments want to have a land tax regime for the ordinary homeowners but we already have this in the form of in south australia an emergency services levy on all our water and our rates bills are are taxed according to the value of the property i mean how much can the average australian put up with if they want to be aspirational they're not getting not able to take home more than 50 of their own income yeah we really are boiled frogs in a sense we keep getting all of these taxes on top of each other and you don't notice it uh we get our income tax and that's obvious but then it's all of those those taxes on expenditures and a lot of times you're not paying that tax directly so say you're a renter you're like oh stamp duty doesn't affect me land tax doesn't affect me council rates aren't a big deal but in reality your landlord is passing those taxes right down to you and as a result you're still paying it so it doesn't really matter whether you rent or you own you're still going to end up to some extent paying these taxes and the crazy thing is emily that as over taxed as we are we've still got a government or government successive governments that can't live within their means they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they don't have which is uh sort of suggests that in the future taxes are going to have to rise again now i don't know how much the regular aussie can can put up with this until they opt out and say no no thanks i'll just sit at home and do nothing and get money from the poor fools who decide to work yeah that would be the rational decision and i think we should be concerned about the deficit and we should make sure that we're in a sense paying for tax cuts and not spending more than we bring in but a lot of times these taxes aren't bringing in much money we get about 90 of our revenue from only 10 taxes so what about the other 115 they're not really bringing in revenue they're doing things like trying to change behavior which isn't necessarily the government's role in this um if they should they should be funding our services and nothing else when they get so much into changing behavior they actually hurt the people that are the most vulnerable like you said about the tobacco tax uh that's a small group of people it's about 11 of the australian population but if you're in the bottom quintile and you're making 25 000 a year that's 20 of your income that's huge that's really affecting people's daily lives and that's something the government should pay attention to and they are handing money back out to those exact same people that are in the bottom quintile because they don't have enough money to survive on so it's this churn of money that is so unnecessary and it goes into the whole what is the role of government what is the responsibilities why do we have this money churn where they clip the ticket to provide you know jobs for so many public servants and so on from the australian taxpayers alliance give what needs to be taken to deliver tax justice here in australia yeah i think first we need to be cutting and then we need to be worrying about government revenue once we cut and once we give more money back to people the government's actually have to spend less one way of looking at it is if there were no taxes someone at that's making the minimum wage will get about a 60 bonus they'd be making over 60 000 essentially in real earnings that's a lot of money someone that's on the average income that's about 45 again a lot of money and we should cut the taxes first and once we cut the taxes we won't have to spend as much making sure people aren't starving people do have enough to survive on yeah this is one of the um the critical things though is governments do need money but they should stick to their knitting we don't need to have a 1 billion or 1.5 billion dollar to taxpayer-funded networks for example we don't need the advertising programs that go on we don't need some of the welfare programs if people had more individual and personal responsibility and were more entrusted to spend their money that they work for appropriately then i think the country would be in a much better place exactly and a lot of times we're really spending money where it doesn't need to be spent a great example are all those bureaucrats making over a million dollars another good example is all the corporate welfare a lot of times it feels like the companies with the best lobbyists are the ones that win and they get these handouts and they get these subsidies we've given out a lot of subsidies during covet those people don't necessarily need that yeah you're exactly right and we've got to keep drawing attention to and that's what the australian taxpayers alliance is doing emily dye thanks so much for your time tonight thanks so much for having me on

Channel: Sky News Australia

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Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021