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We can lower taxes and still cut the deficit… but they’re doing the opposite!

While Treasurer Jim Chalmers sat grinning through the recent Productivity Roundtable, the tax-hungry elites were laying the groundwork for a fresh assault on your wallet.

The proposals weren’t just bad. They were dangerous. A widened GST. A new land tax. A “super profits” tax. A 2% annual wealth tax. Even calls to scrap the capital gains exemption on the family home. Yes, they want to come after that, too.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the Australia Institute is pushing for a death tax to claw into your estate after you’ve already paid tax your whole life. That’s right. They want to tax you when you die.

• A wave of new tax proposals, including wealth, land, and death taxes, signals an aggressive push by bureaucrats and elites to further raid Australians’ incomes.
• Australians already lose over a third of their income to an overwhelming mix of taxes at all levels of government.
• The real issue isn’t revenue shortfall, but a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy that duplicates roles and fails to modernise.
• Public sector growth is outpacing the private economy, creating dependency and fuelling an unsustainable consultancy rort.
• Rather than taxing more, government must slash waste, end the consultancy gravy train, and let working Australians keep more of what they earn.

Thanks to a leaked Treasury document, we now know that deep within the bowels of Canberra, bureaucrats are urging the government to go even further, raising taxes across the board while pretending it’s about “budget repair”. It’s not. It’s about power, control, and funding a bureaucracy that refuses to reform itself.

Major Rip-Off

Australians are taxed hard. The average worker is now handing over nearly one-fifth of their income to income tax alone. That means for around the first two and a half months of the year, you’re working not for your family, not for your business, but for the government.

It’s not until mid-March that you start earning some coin for yourself.

And that’s before you even factor in the rest.

There’s the GST, the Medicare levy, capital gains tax, and stamp duty. But that’s just scratching the surface. Then you’ve got fuel excise, fringe benefits tax, luxury car tax, payroll tax, land tax, alcohol and tobacco excise, vehicle registration, tolls, environmental levies, waste collection fees, council rates, emergency services levies, licence fees, parking fines, and the list keeps going.

When you tally it all up, the average Australian is now losing over a third of their income to taxes at every level: federal, state, and local.

(And we haven’t even added in the blatant revenue-raising found in exorbitant fines that the police are obligated to generate on a daily basis from the very people they are meant to serve and protect.)

That’s not a tax system; it’s a racket sporting the Australian Coat of Arms.

And yet the bureaucrats and tax-happy ideologues still claim it’s not enough. Why? Because they’re protecting their own gravy train.

Trim the Fat

Instead of taxing people more, either directly or through debt-fuelled inflation, the government could slash inefficiencies, rip out duplication, and dismantle the bureaucratic beast that feeds off our labour.

For starters, we’ve got two layers of bureaucracy, federal and state, tripping over each other trying to run the same programs with different rules. Why are two sets of bureaucracies being paid to do one job… and to do it poorly?

The solution? Trim the federal fat, shift responsibility to the states where it belongs, and finally put an end to double-handling and bureaucratic bloat.

Then there’s the problem of outdated processes. In the private sector, businesses digitise or die. In government? Paper forms, old systems, and decades of patchwork IT. One report showed reform in this space could save taxpayers $12 billion and add $19 billion to the economy.

But that’s not the direction we’re heading.

Instead, the public sector is exploding, and it’s choking the real economy. Nearly 135,000 new jobs are forecast in the non-market sector for the 2025–26 year, compared to just 86,500 in the private, productive economy. And over the last year, more than 80% of all new jobs created in Australia have been in public service or heavily subsidised sectors. That’s not real economic growth; it’s government dependency.

Despite repeated vows by politicians to cut red tape, we now have 1 million people working in the public bureaucracy in Australia. And despite all those boots on the ground, departments are still forking out $20 billion a year for external consultants.

Why? Because much of the workforce is underutilised or mismanaged. And the consultants? One report found a good portion of the contracts “were described in such vague terms that they added no value beyond the category label.” In other words, just more taxpayer dollars down the drain.

This isn’t new. A Senate inquiry conducted last year found that government consultancy use had tripled between 1987 and 1993, and then tripled again between 2010 and 2020.

Sure, some consulting is legitimate, but what we’re seeing now is not necessary. It’s a rort, decade after decade. While everyday Australians are told to tighten their belts, this consultancy rort sees a revolving door where public dollars flow to politically connected firms and then back to political parties by way of donations. How so? Collectively, the major consultancy firms, namely PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG, donated over $4.3 million to Labor and the Liberal National Coalition over the past decade.

Meanwhile, it’s the middle class and the self-made, the engine room of this country, who are being bled dry. You’re paying the highest share, while the entrenched elites play games with offshore trusts, loopholes, and corporate carve-outs.

We don’t need more taxes. We need less government.

It’s time to stop punishing productivity and start dismantling the bloated machine that lives off your labour.

No wealth taxes. No land taxes. No death taxes. No family home grabs.

Cut the waste. Cut the bureaucracy.

Let Australians keep what they earn.

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Republished with thanks to Nation First. Image courtesy of Adobe.