When Jim Chalmers became Treasurer, astute observers may have noted distributional breakdowns appearing in Treasury’s Tax Expenditure Statement. The Tax Expenditure Statement is an annual record of money, not spent as outlays, but as deviations or concessions from tax “benchmarks”. It is a method, albeit crude, of measuring how assistance is delivered for some groups or industries via the tax system.
Distributional categories include income deciles, age and gender. The inclusion of age and gender breakdowns with limited context looks to be an attempt to inject identity politics into tax debates, which used to be more centred around questions of economic efficiency, equity and simplicity.
