Fix wasteful spending before hiking up taxes: Taylor
Federal Member for Hume Angus Taylor says wasteful government spending should be fixed before asking people to pay higher taxes. Speaking on Macquarie Radio today, Mr Taylor said discussion on tax reform had started at the wrong place.
“We’ve started by talking about a tax hike and what we should be talking about is how to make government better at what it does, more efficient and less wasteful.
“As I get around my electorate, I hear time and time again examples of government waste, we see it everywhere. We haven’t really started on the journey of fixing that spending problem.
“So when we talk about so called tax reform, it’s easy if you’re containing your spending, but it’s very hard if all you’re trying to do is get more money, to spend more. It’s a great temptation there for politicians, but it’s the wrong thing for Australia.
“Health is a great example. We need to be focussing in our health system on how to keep people more healthy and if they have to spend time in hospital, we try to get them back to healthy very quickly. There’s a lot we can do there. We have a big bureaucracy with lots of duplication, lots of overlap between state and federal levels and we haven’t yet started to address that.
“Hard working Australians, many in my electorate of Hume, who are slaving away running a business or running a farm, they are working very hard for every dollar. And they don’t begrudge tax being spent on the right things - but at the moment I don’t think we’re spending that money anywhere near as well as we should.
“Tax hikes are not real reform. Tax hikes are just a way of politicians getting hold of more money to spend it on their latest pet project. We shouldn’t accept that, it isn’t good enough,” Mr Taylor said.
