Scott Morrison has rejected the suggestion that inequality is getting worse and attacked Bill Shorten for giving up on economic growth.

Bill Shorten is set to announce a Labor policy to crack down on trusts and other forms of tax minimisation, declaring inequality would be Labor’s defining mission in government.

The treasurer warned sectors that use trusts including small business, charities and farmers, Labor was “coming after you”, and rejected Shorten’s central premise that inequality was increasing.

“The latest census showed on the global measure of inequality, which is the Gini coefficient, that is the accepted global measure of income inequality around the world and that figure shows it hasn’t got worse, it has actually got better,” Morrison said.

Asked whether Australians would feel they were doing better given low wage growth, Morrison said his objective was to grow the economy “so they do better and their wages increase”.

“That’s the way you address their problems, you don’t address their problems by just jacking up taxes across the board,” he told ABC.

Bill Shorten hit back at Morrison, saying addressing inequality is a strategy for economic growth. He said the casualisation of the workforce, the penalty rate decision, increasing energy prices and flat wages growth were frustrating Australians.

“Tackling inequality is a growth strategy,” Shorten said. “Australians are worried that they’re going to hand on a worse standard of living to the next generation than the one they inherited.

Professor Peter Whiteford of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University tweeted:

Most recent ABS figures to 2013-14 show increase pic.twitter.com/VRaffWMaDT — Peter Whiteford (@WhitefordPeter) July 23, 2017

Earlier this year, the OECD economic survey of Australia in April found “inclusiveness has been eroded”.

“The Gini coefficient has been drifting up and households in upper-income brackets have benefited disproportionally from Australia’s long period of economic growth,” the report said.

“Real incomes for the top quintile of households grew by more than 40% between 2004 and 2014, while those for the lowest quintile only grew by about 25%.

“Strong growth has pulled the incomes of households with wage earners further ahead of households reliant on transfers or pensions, which dominate the lower end of the income distribution.”

Morrison acknowledged that while Australia had a long period of economic growth, many Australians had not felt that growth.



Morrison said Shorten’s speech showed that Labor had given up on economic growth, that Australians could not get wage increases.

“For Bill Shorten now it’s all about how he carves it up, not how he grows the economy,” Morrison said.

“He is playing heavily into this idea of envy and he’s saying quite bluntly to Australians that he doesn’t have any plans to grow the economy and he just wants to have a discussion about how it is divvied up.”

He said the Coalition view in contrast was to grow the Australian economy and cited 240,000 new jobs created in the 2016-17.

Morrison quoted Shorten’s statements in 2011 in government, when he said trusts were a legitimate feature of the tax system and were not a form of tax avoidance.

