Post #2643878

The Coalition will never make tax brackets index based to inflation. Nor will the ALP. 1. It's too easy a way to get a bit more revenue, then reset it when they need to announce a tax cut. The political advantage for being able to deliver tax cuts that are just bracket adjustments are too high. That alone will ensure it never happens. Which is good, because it's a bad idea. 2. Indexing to CPI won't solve the problem. CPI is uneven - inflation at the low end of income tends to be higher than CPI. 3. It's not inflation that causes bracket creep, it's wage increases. If you're going to do this, you'd tie it to WPI, not CPI. But wages don't go up uniformly. 4. If you wanted to do this properly, you'd tie to income brackets - tie the tax brackets to income percentile, not any fixed number. This is roughly how the brackets are modelled out, anyway. Then, as you earn more _relative to other people_, you'd pay a higher tax rate. 4.1 Income inequality shifts over time, so if you just tied the brackets to CPI, you'd still need to adjust them every so often as it is. 5. The Coalition has repeatedly announced they want to basically get rid of the brackets anyway. You can't have bracket creep if you don't have brackets (insert head-tapping gif here) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-14/coalition-propose-permanent-end-tax-bracket-creep/106679050