Tax Reform in Australia and New Zealand

During 1985, the Labour governments in both Australia and New Zealand proposed a tax mix switch policy in which a broad-based tax on consumption expenditure (at the retail level in Australia, of the value-added type in New Zealand), at a uniform rate, was to provide scope for substantial reduction, by the means of rate reduction, in personal income tax. This major tax reform was to be accompanied, in both countries, by an abandonment of the classical system of company taxation and its replacement by a system of full imputation and the taxation of employee fringe-benefits in the hands of the employer. The tax mix switch part of the proposed tax reforms only went ahead in New Zealand, and in this paper the author investigates the reasons for this phenomenon as an exercise in the political economy of tax reform. Apart from enabling some testing of Prest's hypothesis, that there are advantages for tax reform in a country not having a federal or a written constitution, the required background to this examination is presented, by means of an outline of the fundamentals of the Australian and New Zealand tax systems, and of the proposals put forward for eventual implementation. Likewise the processes by which tax reform was achieved in the two countries are examined, and it is argued that differences in political institutional settings explain the different outcomes. The author also comments on the alternative tax reform strategies which are implicit in the proposals currently being implemented in Australia and New Zealand.