"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in a new order of things" Niccolò Machiavelli wrote around five centuries ago. The beneficiaries of reform, he wrote, will be quiet, but those who benefit from existing arrangements will be very loud in their defence of the status quo.

Geoff Wilson, writing on these pages last Friday, is certainly intent on being noisy. As I have said, he is entitled to set up a partisan campaign with the Liberal Party if he wants to: that is clearly what he is doing. And the campaign is getting shriller and more ridiculous as the next election approaches. He started a petition against Labor's imputation policy but now campaigns against our negative gearing reforms as well and is now clearly engaging in a political campaign, not a policy discussion. Mr Wilson can engage in politics all he likes. But he should not expect his factual inaccuracies to go unanswered.

Labor will return dividend imputation to its original design, as envisaged by Paul Keating. Australia is the only country in the world which provides a refund for corporate tax paid to shareholders if they don't pay income tax. It's a $5 billion a year anomaly that must be fixed in the interest of budget responsibility.

The present system encourages people to be overweight on Australian shares, says Chris Bowen. Dan Himbrechts

Claim: In his oped in the AFR on Friday, Mr Wilson claimed that franking credit refunds are about returning an "overpayment" of corporate tax.

Fact: He has a different definition of "overpayment" to me. Every dollar of excess franking credits claimed as a cash refund is effectively a dollar less of company tax collected by the government for health and education. The refunds mean that every dollar of corporate tax paid by an entity is then just returned to its shareholders as a cash refund, to the extent that its shareholders do not pay income tax. At a time when people are concerned about the erosion of the tax base and that companies pay their fair share of tax, to suggest that the headline rate is an "overpayment" is remarkably out of touch.