Curbing well-off taxpayers' access to key programs could save billions

Curbing access to the child care subsidy, parental leave pay, aged care and pensions for some of the most well-off taxpayers would free up about $21 billion a year, a new report says. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

John Howard once likened the struggle for economic reform to "the runner who is pursuing an ever-receding finishing line".

"If you don't keep running, you don't try to reach it, then others are going to go past you."

Howard used that line in a 2005 speech in Washington. A little over two years later he and the Coalition's 11-year run in office ended in defeat to Kevin Rudd.

In the lead-up to the 2007 election, Labor accused the Howard government of giving up on structural reform. Of losing the appetite for change. Of neglecting infrastructure investment and allowing the economy to drift.

It's been nearly a year since the Albanese government's economic reform summit which was birthed in the wake of Labor's huge 2025 election win.

Expectations were raised that the government would deliver significant changes, that it would attend to problems.

The government claims it has achieved that in the form of ending negative gearing for property and increasing capital gains taxes.

The Greens pledge their support in exchange to a delay on the overhaul of the NDIS.

Productivity growth remains firmly stuck in the doldrums. According to the OECD, Australians have experienced one of the sharpest declines in living standards in the developed world since the pandemic.

The International Monetary Fund this week downgraded Australia's economic outlook and now ranks our economy 18th out of 30 advanced countries.

Analysts at Deloitte predicted the economy will limp along over the next two years at a pace that would be the weakest since the early 1990s recession.

"Australia is now structurally exposed in ways that have become hard to ignore," wrote Deloitte Access Economics partner Stephen Smith.

"Deloitte Access has rarely adopted such a downbeat assessment of the short-term outlook."

The bleakness is not confined to the economy. The budget is forecast to remain in deficit for years to come, and in spite of the government's tax increases.

Fixing the shortfalls amid competing political demands for bigger income tax cuts and rising defence, childcare and aged care spending is a paradox in action.

On Friday, the head of the independent Parliamentary Budget Office delivered a rare public rebuke of how governments can deploy otherwise legitimate budgeting rules to flatter the fiscal bottom line.

"Australia has a strong and credible budget framework," Sam Reinha