Creators trying to make 'wage slaves' care about tax

West Australian

3 days ago

Very few people stop Wentworth MP Allegra Spender on the streets of Bondi to talk about tax reform and she wants that to change.
That's why among the usual cast of economic boffins, politicians and business representatives at the teal independent's tax roundtable in Parliament House on Friday, content creators were packaging up the discussion to cut through to a different audience.
While young people feel the impacts of the tax system on housing unaffordability and stagnant real wages, getting them to care about changing it - and ensuring policymakers know that support is there - is another matter.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who wrote the book on tax reform during the Rudd and Gillard governments, said the current system was broken.
The burden is increasingly shifting onto the shoulders of young people, who are also contending with an increasingly unaffordable housing market.
"Tax policy tragics know that tax reform is necessary, but the thing is that most people in the community do not," he told the roundtable.
"I reckon the best thing that we can do as a group is to help make the case, to help in the construction of a compelling narrative, something that motivates action."
Ms Spender agrees.
"You have to convince people why it's important before you can convince them what the solution is," Ms Spender told AAP.
"People don't come up to me in the street to talk about a particular aspect of tax.
"But they talk to me about the fact that they're worried about their kids, whether they can get a home. They're worried about productivity, and whether our businesses can get access to capital.
"Those are the things that people worry about. They don't necessarily see the link back to tax."
Ms Spender has been taking to Instagram to get the message out.
Also there to spread the message were Konrad Benjamin, whose Punter's Politics videos rack up millions of views on social media, and Natasha Etschmann, a personal finance podcaster with more than 300,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
They have a direct line to a growing cohort of younger Australians who increasingly feel the system is stacked against them.
Getting buy-in from regular punters who felt left out was an important step if things were to change politically, Mr Benjamin said.
The solutions raised around the table were largely the same ones tax reform advocates have been calling for for more than a decade - taxing carbon and resources more effectively, reducing reliance on personal income tax, and boosting incentives for investment.
"They know the solutions," Mr Benjamin said.
"How do you get it through? And how do you communicate it? And that's, I suppose, where we are sitting.
"We're trying to shape the political discourse around something like tax, because it's been dominated by the Murdoch channels.
"But who's bearing the burden? Our generation, wage slaves, us."