Paul Murray: All signs point to red herrings, half-truths and lies on the Federal election campaign trail

You can tell a lot about the potential voters a political party is chasing by the roadside signs used to suck them in. Take the Greens. Three of their most ubiquitous cor flutes in this election are clearly aimed at naive dreamers or people of limited intellect. They read like this: “Tax big corporations”; “End coal and gas”; and my personal favourite, “Want change? Then vote for it.” The first invites prospective Greens voters to believe that big corporations are not taxed. It’s at the dishonest heart of their election messaging. More on that later. The second slogan wants the same group to believe they can exist on renewable energy sources alone, which is a fantasy for which Labor will have to take the blame when our national power system starts to fail in the not-too-distant future. And lastly, a poster for the brain-dead. What is this unspecified “change” that Greens’ propagandists want people to vote for? An increase in defence spending to meet the China threat? Cutting the $350 million we give Indonesia annually in foreign aid while it cuddles up to the Russians? Restoring the death penalty for the most serious crimes? That’s “change” that a lot of Australians might want. But would any of it suit the Greens? Such a vacuous pitch is consistent with the vox pops everyone has seen involving young people full of climate anxiety who can’t ever identify exactly what they want governments to do about it, other than … “act”. But these days the Greens are more interested in money than the environment. Almost all of their election promises of “free stuff” hinge on the idea that big corporations pay no tax and therefore can be plundered to fund their agenda. It epitomises the party’s socialist journey, which has seen the Greens transmogrify from a bunch of dope-smoking anti-nuclear tree-huggers into rabid wealth redistributors. If Australians could trust that a Labor government re-elected on Greens preferences would not be forced to adopt Greens policies in a hung parliament, these issues wouldn’t be so important. But everyone knows Anthony Albanese is lying when he promises he would not do a deal with the Greens to secure a second term. The latest Greens pamphlet in my letter box from senator Jordon Steele-John says: “This election, there is hope. Right now, one-in-three big corporations pay no tax. We can tax them to fund the things we need.” This attack goes back to a statement put out by Tasmanian Greens senator Nick McKim in November claiming that “the latest ATO figures on tax show that one in three large companies is paying no tax during a cost-of-living crisis that they are helping to drive”. How companies that are paying no tax — almost certainly because they are making no money — are worsening the cost-of-living crisis is nowhere explained. “The latest figures show 1253 large companies out of the 3985 with a turnover of more than $100m did not pay a single dollar in tax,” Senator McKim said. “We need corporate super profits taxes now, and we need much harsher laws to stop corporate tax avoidance. Money raised could directly fund cost-of-living relief like making GP visits free, putting mental and dental health into Medicare and wiping student debt.” These “latest” figures released by the ATO that sparked the Greens are for the 2022-23 financial year in which many big corporations were still suffering the financial effects of the pandemic. The ATO’s 2022-23 corporate tax transparency report says Australian companies in that period were influenced by “rising interest rates; increasing inflation; mixed commodity prices in which most commodities were down”. However, the Greens must have missed this headline statement by the taxman: “Tax paid in 2022–23 was the highest since corporate tax transparency reporting started and increased by $14 billion (16.7 per cent) to $97.9b on the prior year.” Oops. Wouldn’t want the facts to get in the way of a good “soak the rich” story. Like this bit from the ATO report: “Tax paid by the oil and gas sector increased from $1.5b in 2021−22 to $11.6b in 2022−23.” (That’s from the height of pandemic chaos.) “Around $4.3b of the increase was due to our earlier interventions in the oil and gas sector now flowing through the system, positively impacting tax collections.” Even the Greens’ biggest bogeymen are paying much more tax. Imagine the Budget shortfall without that revenue when they “end coal and gas”. So which companies are not paying any tax? Well, they would be the ones not in profit. The Greens’ understanding of finances doesn’t seem to extend to the simple proposition that a business only pays tax on its profits. Even though the ATO’s report explains in detail why some companies pay no tax, it obviously eluded the Greens’ brains trust. Or they just chose to ignore it. “Where a corporate entity has tax deductions that exceed its income, it can incur a tax loss and pay no tax for that year,” the report says. “We examine companies making a tax loss very carefully to understand why they are making a loss and whether this represents a compliance risk. We apply considerable resources to ensure these taxpayers are paying the right amount of tax.” The ATO then directly addresses the 31 per cent of corporate entities that paid no tax that led to the Greens’ one-in-three mantra. “This proportion is similar to ASX data, which shows around 20–30 per cent of ASX 500 companies reporting a net loss to their shareholders in any given year,” the ATO report said. “The ASX data shows that even extremely large companies will sometimes not make a profit in a year when they expand or face challenging market conditions.” But the one-in-three claim is misleading, as the ATO warns. The figure is closer to 20 per cent, but the Greens ignore that too: “Many single entities that did not pay tax are members of a tax paying corporate group. This includes all entities under a single ultimate holding company or under the ownership of a single individual, trust or partnership. “When we analyse this population at the group level, the percentage with nil tax payable drops from 31 per cent to 21 per cent because at least one entity in the group did pay tax.” But, of course, you couldn’t fit that on a roadside sign. Or inside the head of a featherbrained Greens voter. Those who don’t swallow the Greens’ propaganda can see the “tax big corporations” magic pudding just doesn’t exist. As a result, the Greens’ electoral manifesto to provide free dental care, free child care, free university education and to pay off all student debt, has no funding source. Not only the Greens are roadside sign miscreants. The leafy western suburbs are festooned with Kate Chaney’s proclaiming her to be “independent, balanced, accountable”. While Chaney professes to be independent of political party affiliation, her voting record shows she is much less independent of the Greens than Labor and most independent of the Liberals. The “balanced” bit must be referring to her bank balance. Chaney admits to raising an extraordinary $975,203 for her 2022 campaign, of which $450,000 came from Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 organisation. It should be obvious by now that Climate 200 has one real political purpose. That is to stop Liberal candidates being elected in conservative seats. In terms of being accountable, Chaney lists donations on her website. Since April 1, it shows 46 of her donors as “anonymous”. How is that transparent or accountable? Of the named donors so far this month, $116,000 came from Climate 200 and $53,386 from the Vida Fund, which backs female candidates only on the basis of pursuing gender issues. Chaney discloses 18 separate donations from Climate 200 since February 2022 totalling $753,625. So if Chaney and Holmes a Court have achieved nothing else, they brought US-style big money politics to Curtin. The Liberal Party obviously didn’t spend much on its election slogan of “Let’s get Australia back on track”, which is as anodyne as Peter Dutton’s entire campaign. It makes the mistake of being backward looking, recalling a past that too few voters remember — and even less value. The Liberals’ “25¢ cheaper fuel” is better, but comes at the cost of fiscal responsibility which was at the centre of that political past. Labor’s “Building Australia’s Future” is as bland as Anthony Albanese, but at least it avoids the inclusion of a mistruth, which has been the hallmark of his campaign. However, the slogan was almost immediately sidelined by Labor’s real underlying campaign message: Don’t vote for Dutton. And of all the political lines in this turgid election season, that’s the one that is working.