Abstract: There is an urgent need for an equitable taxation system in Australia. It is rare for Fabian socialists to find themselves adopting a conservative stance: but the debate on estate and gift duties is an example of how to be ultimately progressive by trying to preserve what was equitable and socially desirable in Australia’s traditional tax arrangements.
An underlying assumption of much Australian political debate is that the fundamentals of government revenue and expenditure are more or less set. Correspondingly, the initiatives pursued by any one government will tend to be fairly superficial when looked at from a long-term perspective. The second half of the 1970s proved conclusively how wrong such an assumption can be.
Published by the Victorian Fabian Society,
Copyright Robert Ray & the Victorian Fabian Society 1983
Cover Design by Vane Lindesay
ISBN 978-0-909953-21-8