BY SUE BOLAND
Many people said it at the time of the 1998 election, many more are now saying it but still the government, and even the official "opposition", still deny the truth: no amount of compensation or exemptions can ever make the goods and services tax fair.
Unfairness is in the tax by design. The federal Coalition government's central reason for introducing the GST was to force even the poorest people to pay up. Now, even the homeless pay tax.
By increasing the tax burden on the poor and on all workers, the GST provided the government with enough revenue to cut corporate taxes. After introducing the GST, the government cut the company tax rate from 36% to 30% and halved the capital gains tax. Tax cheats like Kerry Packer pay even less tax now than they did before, because their companies are reimbursed by the tax office for the GST they pay.
Even the half-hearted anti-tax avoidance measures such as taxing family trusts in a similar manner to companies, which the government agreed to in order to secure Australian Democrats support for the tax package, have now been shelved.
The case seems clear cut. Given that the Coalition government and its backers lied to the public in order to introduce the GST, you would think that at least one of the major "opposition" parliamentary parties would be calling for the GST to be abolished.
On the contrary — they have all either ruled this out or are silent on the issue.
With opinion polls showing that the majority of the population oppose the GST, any organisation of influence which campaigned for its abolition would surely quickly win massive support.
The Labor Party however claims that now the GST is in place, it is "impossible" to abolish. Instead, the ALP says it only will "roll back" the consumption tax.
It is likely that the ALP's GST rollback will be extremely modest, to the point of non-existence. So far, it has only promised to remove the GST from tampons and sanitary pads and from the rent charged to people living in caravan parks.
An ALP government might exempt a few other things but Labor leader Kim Beazley has indicated that it would take a Labor government "some considerable time" to roll back the GST. That's code for saying that some GST exemptions would only be implemented in the second term of an ALP government.
Beazley's excuse for not revealing any more on its GST rollback plan is that the state of the budget will not be revealed by Treasury until 10 days before the federal election, a lame excuse if ever there was one.
The ALP never explains why it is "impossible" to repeal the GST, although it implies that abolition is complicated and that there would be no replacement revenue.
But abolition is far less complicated than rollback, and the revenue to replace the foregone tax could easily be reclaimed by increasing company taxes and capital gains tax.
Labor, however, values its relationship with big business, the most vociferous backers of regressive taxation for obvious reasons, above its relationship with working people.
Despite public opposition to the GST, the Democrats are sticking to their deal. Without their backing, the tax would never have gotten through the Senate; reversing their stance now would be like publicly confessing to betraying the voting public.
Democrats leader Senator Meg Lees still claims that "tax reform" (read, the GST) was "necessary" and that the compensation was "fair". Lees has even indicated that the Democrats would vote against any attempt by the ALP to roll back the tax.
Despite the media painting Democrats leadership contender Senator Natasha Stott Despoja as an anti-GST crusader, she too is nothing of the sort. She supports rolling back the GST from some extra items, such as books and education, but is not opposed to the tax itself and supported the party's position of taxing some food.
Like Stott Despoja, One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson has also attempted to portray herself as a campaigner against the tax, but her statements on the GST are not so clear cut.
Although Hanson condemns the tax package for causing increased suffering, and although she accuses the ALP of being two-faced for refusing to abolish the GST, Hanson does not appear to have ever called for the tax to actually be abolished.
Initially, in 1998, she was not opposed to the GST, but rather supported "offsets" to address her concerns about the tax's fairness. Her opposition to the GST only developed as the tax became electorally unpopular.
In contrast, Greens Senator Bob Brown voted against the GST in the Senate and Greens' policy is to oppose a broad-based consumption tax (although they support some other indirect taxes such as carbon taxes). However, since the introduction of the GST, the Greens have been surprisingly silent on the tax and on Labor's rollback plan.
The loudest and most unequivocal calls for the total abolition of the GST in the coming federal election will likely come from the socialist left. One of the campaign slogans of the Socialist Alliance, which includes eight socialist groups including the Democratic Socialist Party, is for the abolition of the regressive tax and the imposition of higher taxes on corporations and the super-rich.
So far, trade unions and welfare groups appear to have accepted the Labor Party's argument that it is too complicated to abolish the GST and, by so doing, have abrogated their responsibility to represent the interest of workers and welfare recipients.
If they were to choose a different path, and join with left political groups and activists in a broad campaign against the GST, the chances of mobilising wide sections of an increasingly angry public are great — as would be the chances of abolishing, and not just tinkering with, a tax deliberately designed to hurt working people.