Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan is all hairy chested on tax in The Australian today:

Incentive is being squeezed out of our tax system, especially for low and middle-income families…

All the Government can offer is more of the same: overtaxing us between elections and then bribing us with the same money at election time…

Even the Government’s strongest ideological supporters… are losing patience. They can see the essential character of what the Government’s tax and family benefits policies are about: tax churn and the undermining of the family.

Australia needs a new national reform agenda, one that will invest rather than squander the proceeds of prosperity.

At the top of the list we need extra investment in education, training and infrastructure.

But it’s not just how we spend national revenue that counts. How we collect it and at what levels we collect it are also vitally important. This makes taxation reform an absolutely central element of Labor’s economic reform agenda.

Of course, they had all this, yonks ago. Mark Latham had a tax plan ready to go. The concept of reform was just a little too radical for the ALP to cope with.

We’ll wait for the policy with interest – but a tick to Swan for the rhetoric. It’s just a pity he didn’t supply the figures to back his case up. Still, they’re also in today’s Oz, courtesy of George Megalogenis. You need to read the paper to get the full details, but there’s the nub:

The number to compute in the tax reform debate is $42 billion. This is the best measure of Peter Costello’s ultimate revenue windfall — the excess that came his way when compared with the budget estimates made just three years ago, before the China boom commenced. That figure is the benchmark for an opportunity lost…

This is the opportunity lost. The free-money reform window closed last month when Treasury reported that company tax revenue, while still booming, had come in $1.5 billion less than was expected for 2005-06. A month before that, the Reserve Bank warned that any election bribes next year that run down the surplus will be met with more interest rate rises. The tax cuts cycle has turned against the Government.

Then Mega asks: “What happens when the economy’s winning streak ends?” His answer? “The government that confronts the next downturn will have to take money off the middle class, which carries the risk of an even deeper downturn.”

Paul Keating stood for ideas when he was Treasurer. If there was ever a succinct argument that the man who now has the job has neither the ideas nor the mettle to be prime minister, Megalogenis has provided it today.