An
alternately smug and surly Treasurer dumped the Dick Warburton/Peter Hendy tax
report at a lengthy press conference in Canberra yesterday.

“Australia has the eighth lowest tax burden of
the 30 OECD countries,” he boasted. It also has
a government that has increased its total tax take – completely contrary to its
own fundamental philosophical principles.

It has a
government that keeps a tax system that punishes some of the worst off when
they make that extra effort – contrary to social justice and, again, completely
contradicting the values it supposedly espouses. And it has
a government that uses this bloated, unfair tax take to bribe pet interest
groups.

Costello
didn’t really sound as if he was enjoying himself yesterday. No wonder.
He’s accomplice to an almighty fraud.