THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Anthony Albanese’s historic battle cry in a war on family wealth

Anthony Albanese’s historic battle cry in a war on family wealth

History reveals him for the envy-driven far-Leftist that he is. Has he changed? When pressed, he did not renounce his past far-out comments

Anthony Albanese sharply criticised capitalism and family wealth as causes of social injustice while suggesting incomes above $100,000 a year were not entirely deserved.

The Opposition Leader made the previously unreported remarks while arguing for an inheritance tax when he was assistant general secretary of NSW Labor in the early 1990s.

“If you become a millionaire through hard work or investment you are taxed on it,” Mr Albanese said. “If, however, you gain your wealth through the lottery of birth then there’s no taxation and you achieve that economic influence in society through nothing other than sheer luck. I believe that quite clearly is in contradiction to Labor’s social justice objectives.”

At the 1991 Australian Labor Party centenary conference, Mr Albanese introduced a resolution for the Hawke government to consider an inheritance taxes.

The treasurer at the time, John Kerin, and commerce minister, John Button, rejected Mr Albanese’s idea as politically unpalatable. The revelation comes as the Morrison government steps up its attack on Mr Albanese’s character and policy record in the wake of damaging Newspoll figures showing the Coalition trailing Labor.

Mr Albanese has since moved away from his radical left heritage, positioning himself as a centrist politician and safe pair of economic hands ahead of the upcoming federal election.

But in June 1991, Mr Albanese began his speech by quoting comments made by former Labor senator Robert Ray in a pamphlet titled The Case for Death Duties distributed by the British socialist think tank, the Fabian Society.

“If I can begin with a quote from a delegate to the conference which sums up the situation, that delegate said that: Accumulated income in the form of capital is for all socialists at least part of the source of many social injustices,” Mr Albanese said, noting the delegate was Senator Ray.

He insisted people earning incomes of more than $100,000 (about $200,000 today) did not “actually earn them”.

“We are not looking at Mr and Mrs Suburbia in the middle class to hit this tax with,” Mr Albanese told the Labor conference in Hobart.

“We are really looking at the top 10 per cent of town and if I started on a quote from Robert Ray, I think I can finish on a quote from (former Labor finance minister) Peter Walsh and that quote is that moreover, those who get very high – say over $100,000 incomes per year – do not actually earn them.”

While Mr Albanese gave the speech three decades ago, the radical ideas he espoused epitomise his socialist past that he has sought to bury as he asks the Australian public to elect him prime minister.

Five years after he gave the speech, he entered federal parliament at the 1996 election.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Mr Albanese posed a “significant threat to Australia’s economic future with his socialist ideals and lack of economic experience, having never held a Treasury portfolio”. “He has spent his whole career being a cheerleader for higher taxes,” he said.

“The carbon tax, the mining tax, congestion tax, retirees tax, housing tax, family business tax, higher taxes on income and superannuation and, most damning of all, death duties.”

Asked about his speech, Mr Albanese said Mr Frydenberg’s attack over his support for an inheritance tax showed the government had “no substantial critique of the policies Labor is taking to the upcoming 2022 election, which is what we will implement if we are elected”. “It is a sign of the absolute desperation from a divided, dishonest and incompetent government that they are using taxpayer-funded staff to analyse debates which are more than three decades old,” he said.

In the speech, Mr Albanese went on to claim that money inherited or gifted had not been earned by the recipient and should be taxed. Death duties would “distribute inheritances more widely than a mere duty on the estate”, he said. “It could also take into account gifts and other requests over a period of time as one way of ensuring that there was minimal avoidance of such a tax.”

Without an inheritance tax, Mr Albanese argued, there was a “horizontal inequity against earned income, in favour of unearned income”.

The commerce minister at the time, Button, responded to Mr Albanese’s resolution by saying the policy had been taken from the Australian Democrats and “probably hasn’t been very well thought out”. He appealed to Labor delegates not to introduce death duties because “the text of this resolution will be picked on by our opponents with glee”. Button also noted that Walsh, whom Mr Albanese had quoted, had said the inheritance tax “should apply to $50,000 thresholds”.

Kerin said that before the states had traded away death duties “there was a lot of destruction done to Australian farming”.

“I want to run into the next election with no new taxes,” he said. “Whatever you do, delegates, don’t give the Liberals the opportunity to misrepresent this woefully as we run into the next election because they will do that.”

During his speech, which repeatedly addressed “Comrade Chair”, Mr Albanese rejected the proposal for a consumption tax – like the GST – and instead said there should be taxes that hit the “top end of a town” – a turn of phrase adopted by Mr Albanese’s predecessor, Bill Shorten, during the 2019 election campaign.

“I believe there could be no greater political distinction coming out of this conference in showing the real distinction between the Labor Party and the conservatives in our centenary year than the fact that the conservative forces are pushing a consumption tax,” he said.

“This conference has rejected, earlier on, a consumption tax unanimously and a suggestion that we actually consider looking at things which hit the top end of town out of this conference would be an appropriate measure.”

Criticising the Hawke government, he said the profits of the Prices and Incomes Accord (an agreement between the ACTU and the Labor Party) “have been wasted and squandered in an orgy of speculation and unproductive investment”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/anthony-albaneses-historic-battle-cry-in-war-on-family-wealth/news-story/39c66fd0cac6eea9558077f6f6967286?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=&utm_content=&net_sub_uid=

*********************************************

No comments:

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Anthony Albanese’s historic battle cry in a war on family wealth

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive