ScoMo holding firm

Treasurer refuses to water down tax cuts before Senate

TREASURER Scott Morrison has ruled out splitting or amending plans for personal income and corporate tax cuts to ease their passage through the Senate.

Mr Morrison says his Upper House colleagues have been working with the “unpredictable and confusing” Senate crossbench to garner support for the twin tax packages.

Asked whether the tax debate had descended into a game of political “chicken”, Mr Morrison said: “The Government won’t be blinking.”

The Opposition’s Treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said the Government’s whole approach to the tax debate was they’d take their “bat and ball and go home” if they didn’t get their way.

“That’s just childish,” Dr Leigh said. “They will continue to say they won’t yield until finally they do. Once they have exhausted all the other options they’ll take the sensible path.”

But Finance Minister and the Government’s chief negotiator in the Senate, Mathias Cormann, is also refusing to give in to Labor’s demands to split the seven-year, multiphase personal income tax plan.

The package, which is worth $140 billion over the next decade, was to be debated in the Upper House for the first time yesterday.

Labor backs two tax changes that will start from July 1, but opposes further changes in 2022 and 2024.

The Greens do not support any tax cuts.

Australian Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi will be backing the tax cuts “to the hilt”, but independent senator Tim Storer only supports the low and middle-income offset and insists he will not be horsetrading.

Senator Brian Burston, who split from One Nation over the issue and later joined mining magnate Clive Palmer’s new political party, says he will keep to the agreement with Senator Cormann to support the tax cuts in full.