While I assume that readers of this blog know what Liberal, Labor, the Greens and the Christian Democratic Party stand for, there are four other parties standing candidates in Bennelong, with which you might be less familiar. This post aims to provide a quick overview of the positions of those parties.
Palmer United Party
The Palmer United Party is running a slogan-based campaign of policies that are crafted to be superficially attractive, but do not withstand close scrutiny.
Take, as an example, their statement that if the $70billion collected in business PAYG income tax were deferred until the end of the financial year, the Government would collect billions in GST revenue from the extra spending by business. This claim is complete economic nonsense for at least the following reasons:
- The Government would then need to borrow, and pay interest, to fund the deferral of revenue.
- When the Government collects money, it spends it just as quickly as, if not more quickly than, businesses would, and when they spend it, and any business they pay the money to, will pay the same GST as a business that another business pays the money to.
- More significantly, GST paid on things bought by business is actually claimed back almost immediately in input tax credits - for the most part, it is only the GST on things end consumers buy, that the Government gets to keep. You have to increase consumer spending to increase the amount of GST the Government collects - business spending has very little effect on collected GST. This is a fairly complex issue that is not widely understood outside of accountants and tax lawyers, buy my summary here is correct.
- Businesses that spend money that should be set aside to pay taxes very frequently go bust. If you defer the payment of the tax for a year, you will have many more businesses going bust without paying their taxes.
Palmer United make a lot of promises of lower taxes and increased pensions. Their list of policies suggests they are prepared to spend about $160billion on tax cuts and increased spending, although it is more like $100billion because they appear to be counting the Government's existing health funding of about $64billion as part of their health funding of $80billion.
Whether their spending amounts to $100billion or $180billion, their policies are financially reckless. They could not be achieved without serious defecits, serious undisclosed cuts to services, or tax increases - they would have to attack the rest of the budget with napalm to achieve what they promise.
Democratic Labor Party
This party has a strange mix of left wing, right wing, centre liberal and religion inspired policies, with a bit of junk science thrown in. Their best policies are mostly harmless. Their worst policies adopt the worst of various extreme policital views, including discredited protectionism, religious bigotry, direct interference in the internal affairs of other nations, opposition to multiculturalism, opposition to gay marriage, school vouchers.
Secular Party
The Secular Party's foundational principal is that religion has no place in politics or policy. Their other policies derive from that, so that their policies promote individual freedom and oppose government interference in private affairs. This means the policies are almost all by-the-book centre-liberal policies, and I think most people will find almost all of their policies very sensible.
The policy of promoting individual freedom is reflected in policies in favour of gay marriage and legalising voluntary euthanasia.
Some of their policies do go far enough that they risk offending adherents to religions, and the "Secular Party" branding does not help with that. One policy some might have difficulty accepting is a ban on religious education in school (private schools would be allowed to foster religion provided it is out of hours and voluntary).
Their opposition to religion in politics is so strong that their how-to-votes put the parties with religious elements in their policies (including the Democratic Labor Party) even further down on the list than the nazi parties.
Australia First Party
This party is a nationalist socialist party. You may be more familiar with this kind of party by its contracted name, "nazi". Before writing that I was concerned I might be breaching Godwin's law, but I checked, and it is not a violation of Godwin's law if that term is used as an accurate description.
The party's current leader was actually previously the leader of a party called the National Socialist Party, but even though the Australia First Party does not bear the "National Socialist" name, it certainly bears the policies of the national socialist movement.
The party is openly racist, openly nationalist, and openly socialist.