Month: March 2005

Creeping capitalism

John Quiggin40 Comments

In today’s Fin (subscription required), Sinclair Davidson tries to resuscitate the claim that Australian taxpayers are suffering from severe bracket creep, a claim I refuted in my piece last week (over the fold). The case is so thin that he spends half of his article restating a version of the claim I’d already refuted, before admitting that it is spurious (this is the claim that the abolition of the old 66 per cent rate, by making 47 per cent the new top rate, put more people into the top tax bracket. While this is trivially true, it’s also clear that this change was the opposite of bracket creep).

Davidson’s second argument, involves an interesting redefinition of the terms of debate. The standard approach has been to look at either the real income level or the proportion of average weekly earnings at which the top rate is payable. The real income level has risen over time and the proportion of average weekly earnings has been roughly stable. Davidson instead looks at the proportion of taxpayers paying the top rate. Obviously, if pretax incomes become more unequal, as they did over the 1990s, this proportion will rise, and this is what he finds.
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Not an appealing judgement

John Quiggin25 Comments

This kind of thing makes me think that the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal has some sort of death-wish. It has overturned a conviction in a lengthy drug trial, on the grounds that the wrong person signed the indictment, although it was common ground that this had no effect on the fairness of the trial. Following a series of disastrous decisions to hold retrials in gang rape cases, which have already led to amendments to the law designed to repudiate the Court’s judgements[1], I’d have thought the judges would be cautious about playing this kind of game with technicalities.

A decision like this is bound to produce a further reaction, and probably an over-reaction, from the legislature. We could easily see changes to procedures, designed to preclude further appeals of this kind, that eliminate important safeguards against unfair trials. In their quest to protect the niceties of some imagined ideal system of law, appropriate to a world of unlimited resources and costless trials, the Court of Appeal is gravely damaging the system we actually have to live with.

fn1. For example, the Tayyab Sheikh case elicited an amendment to rules about publicity, and the recent successful appeals by the Skaf brothers have produced rules allowing retrials to be conducted on the basis of transcripts.