Mr Howard suggested that
Mr Abbott replace him with Malcolm Turnbull to
reinvigorate the government and its economic narrative.
Mr Abbott rejected the
advice of his mentor.
Mr Howard and Mr Costello
– the duo that won the 1998 election campaigning for a
GST – gave their advice to Mr Abbott separately but were
united in the need for a new treasurer.
Mr Abbott was wary of Mr
Turnbull's ambitions: "Turnbull doesn't want to be
treasurer, he wants to be prime minister," was an Abbott
phrase. Scott Morrison was another option, but Mr Abbott
thought his loyalty suspect too.
Mr Abbott only decided to,
in effect, offer the job to Mr Morrison in a desperate
last gambit to save the government.
The Hockey tax plan was
considered highly sensitive and did not go before the
Abbott cabinet for debate.
The prime minister was
interested in the plan but non-committal, the sources
said.
"At a minimum," Mr Abbott
told Fairfax Media, "we would have had modest tax cuts
based on spending restraints.
"There were options for
more radical reform, but whether we would have plumped
for one or another would have depended on developments
over the next few months, including what sort of
cooperation we were going to get from the states."
Mr Hockey's proposal was
designed to tax consumption more but to tax income less,
the same essential concept as the Howard-Costello GST-based
reform.
The extra GST, worth
around $40 billion a year after it had been phased in
over two to four years according to the sources, was to
fund cuts to income taxes and company taxes, and pay
compensation to low income earners.
The Hockey plan did not
propose to expand the GST coverage beyond the existing
tax base, so it would not apply to fresh food,
education, health or financial services, the sources
said.
This was because of the
complexities in taxing financial services, and because
of problems of fairness in taxing the other items.
Shirtfronted also reveals
who proposed the controversial measures that became the
hallmarks of the 2014 budget.
That budget was the
threshold for the Abbott government's standing in the
polls. Until the budget, the government was consistently
ahead. Afterwards, it went permanently into a losing
position.
Source:
The Sydney Morning Herald, dated 02/12/2015. |