independent MP Allegra Spender on making tax fairer for younger Australians

With parliament now finished its first fortnight’s session, attention will soon be on the government’s August 19-21 economic reform roundtable, bringing together business, unions, experts and community representatives to pursue consensus on ways to lift Australia’s flagging productivity.

Independent member for Wentworth Allegra Spender is one of the 25 participants invited to the roundtable. She’s particularly focused on tax reform and last week held a tax roundtable of her own.

Spender joined the podcast to talk about making tax fairer, the need for greater economic reform, climate policy, the social media ban for under 16s, a ceasefire in Gaza, and more.

On her ambitions on tax policy, Spender says income tax indexation is something that would benefit younger, working Australians:

Myself and actually another number of crossbenchers […] wrote to both the government and the opposition last term, really pushing for tax indexation. And really the heart of this is startling statistics from last term. The [Reserve Bank of Australia] put out some information that showed that bracket creep was a bigger impost on average households’ budgets than the RBA increases in the interest rate.

[…] Just to give you two statistics about young working people: households over the age of 65, in the last 10 odd years, have grown their wealth by around 50%. Households under the age of 35 have not grown their worth at all, pretty much. So they are going backwards relative to the rest of the country. A household, two households, both on a $100,000, sitting next to each other. If [one] household is retired, they have to pay on average half the tax of a working age household.

Spender says the system is stacked against young people, who “are really struggling economically compared to previous generations”.

It’s in your early and midlife that you need money for housing, to raise kids and everything else. So we don’t have a tax system that works for younger people. We have a tax system that burdens younger people strongly and then actually gives people more tax breaks when they’re older, and normally wealthier.

On climate targets, Spender says while she’ll be guided by the yet-to-be-provided Climate Change Authority’s advice, she wants to see Australia “try and lead other countries” – pointing to the United Kingdom, which has set a target to cut emissions by at least 81% by 2035.

The Climate Change Authority put out their interim guidance to say that a target within 65 to 75% [emissions reduction on 2005 levels] was both achievable from an economic point of view and also appropriate towards a scientific point of view.

My view is that we should be at the very top end of that. Now, if the Climate Change Authority significantly reviews, you know, revises down their targets, I will reconsider. But I think really what we should be doing is to say how can we be as ambitious as possible. And the reason I think that is important is actually, you know, from a business point of view, ambition and certainty is what they need to make the big investments that will actually achieve it.

Ambition is needed from a scientific point of view, because if we took, say, less than 75% [emissions reduction], and the rest of the world did too, we would be looking at outcomes that are catastrophic for Australia. Regular days in Sydney and Melbourne that are above 50 degrees. A huge loss of coral reef. Continued adverse weather events.

On the news that the government will include YouTube in its social media ban for under 16s, Spender says it’s now up to social media companies to make their websites safer to lift the bans.

My eldest daughter [who’s 12] has a strong view on this. And she’s actually a big fan of the ban. She was like, ‘I just don’t understand how it makes sense to leave YouTube in and TikTok out’ […] She’s not on social media, but other people are, and she finds it sometimes frustrating.

But I think the challenge on this is always going to be the implementation. I think it’s fiendishly complicated to implement. I think genuinely the most valuable part of this ban is actually the signal to families and parents about what is expected and what isn’t.

[…] I think the ball’s in the social media companies’ courts. If they want to move to a life beyond the ban, they need to show how they can make their platforms safe for younger Australians, because I don’t think they have delivered that to date. So I’d be open if they can provide the evidence of how they can change things. I’m always open minded to reversing or changing those bans. But at the moment, [social media] isn’t safe.