“The flattening of our progressive taxation system, designed and legislated by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, will give someone earning $200,000 a year a tax cut of around $10,000 a year by 2024. Of the $158bn total cost of the tax cuts, around $95bn will go to the highest income earners.
If you think that sounds a little unfair, don’t worry – there is a good reason for it, according to the PM, because “the harder [people] work, the more they earn, the more they keep of what they earn”.
Get it? People earn $200,000 or more because they work harder! The top 5% of income earners in this country just put in more hours and make more effort than the other 95% of us.
According to the PM, investment bankers and financial advisers and management consultants and partners in law firms do the most difficult, physically and mentally demanding jobs, work the longest hours and make the greatest contribution to society, so they deserve to be wealthy, and to keep more of that wealth to themselves.
This is, of course, absolute, unmitigated nonsense.
Ask any waitress (average salary $24,500 per year), or early childhood educator ($50,000), or storeman ($51,000), or registered nurse ($65,000), or teacher ($65,700), or senior police constable ($90,000), or paramedic ($92,000) if they don’t work as hard as a management consultant sitting in an office all day. Be prepared for roars of laughter in return.
That the prime minister of Australia believes that high-income earners work harder than the ordinary Australians who do the essential, undervalued work that keeps society together exposes a deep class prejudice, and shows that he is completely out of touch with ordinary working people.”
