South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s willingness to countenance an increase to the GST angered federal Labor colleagues. But Weatherill tells Michelle Grattan he has no regrets about his “circuit-breaker” intervention – although he also concedes an increase to the GST is not really a solution to the states’ revenue problems.
“It raises too much money in the early years and too little in the later years because GST is not growing at the rate of the growth of our health care expenditure,” he says.
“Even if we were to get a 15% GST it would just kick the can down the road for another 10 or 15 years to be back talking about this problem,” he says.
Weatherill explains why he has called for the states to receive a share of income tax revenue, the problems associated with raising land-based taxes and his disappointment in Malcolm Turnbull.
“This sort of approach that we’re now getting from Malcolm Turnbull is the sort of thing that reminds us of Tony Abbott. The glib one-liners, what I have described as an infantile debate where you can just focus on one thing without looking at the whole picture.”