As we approach the tabling of the Federal Government’s budget on May 13, the campaign to define the parameters of the debate and the priorities of the budget cuts intensifies.

The daily headlines of the flagship of the conservatives and the Coalition Government in this country, Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, are indicative of this effort.

‘Hockey’s budget warning: we all have to contribute. Audit Commission signals need for billions in welfare cuts’ was the headline in The Australian last Thursday and then … on Monday night, Prime Minister Tony Abbott signalled that there will be a threshold of $100,000 dollars to determine who gets social security ‘handouts’ from the Federal Government.

The very same day that The Australian was making headlines with the ‘PM’s $100k welfare test for families’, the other popular flagship of the conservatives, Melbourne’s Herald Sun, run with an exclusive as its main story. ‘Tax smash. You’ll have to pay at least $800 more’ was the headline of the newspaper, making reference to the idea of the so called deficit tax for those who earn $80,000 and over per annum.

The government and its allies, having pushed the argument that the budget is in a mess and needs to be fixed, in order to measure the reactions of the voters and in order to attempt to balance the political impact of the new budgetary measures, are focusing the debate on the need for fair sacrifices on both the ‘top’ and the medium to bottom end of the income ladder. ‘Pain to last years, says Treasury’, was the headline in The Australian on Monday. In case we miss the point, the newspaper repeats its main argument again in its editorials. “Tony Abbott is absolutely right: the whole community must share in the heavy lifting of fiscal repair.”

The big ‘blow’ in the pre-budget debate came on Thursday with the recommendations of the economically ‘dry’ Commission of Audit for massive cuts to social services and the size of government. The government and the welfare state, of course, happen to be the most important tools in the hands of the less fortunate to better their lives!

The fact that Australia’s public debt is only a fraction of the debt of other major western advanced countries is not mentioned in the pre-budget debate. Neither is mentioned the fact that individual, company, or state debt, if used to produce future wealth and growth is really an investment and not debt. Furthermore, what is left completely out of the debate is the revenue side of the budget and the possibility of changing or broadening the revenue base of the state.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the total taxation revenue for all three tiers of government in Australia, in the 2011-12 financial year, was 390 billion dollars.

This revenue was collected mostly by taxes on income, which amounted to 231 billion dollars, or 59.2 per cent of the total government income. Taxes on property, on the other hand, amounted to 33.5 billion dollars or 8.6 per cent and employers payroll taxes amounted to 19.7 billion dollars or approximately 5 per cent of the total government revenue. The rest of the revenue came from taxes on provisions of goods and services, 94.2 billion dollars (24.2 per cent) and from taxes on use of goods and performance of activities, 11.8 billion dollars (3 per cent).

The fact that in Australia we leave out of the public attention and out of the public debate the revenue side of the budget implies that we cannot really have a comprehensive discussion about the priorities of the budget, or about issues of social justice.

The most talked about book in the USA in the last few weeks, the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty, is proving the point that income from capital and unequal ownership of assets, not income from earning, predominate in the top of the income distribution and determine income disparities and drive inequality in the world.

Piketty arrived at this conclusion by collecting and analysing the tax returns in twenty countries over at least the last 100 years. His argument is that unless we have a progressive taxation system, that includes the implementation of a wealth-assets tax, we are running the danger of moving back into the more unequal world of the 19th century.

Are we talking about these issues in Australia? A country without an inheritance tax for example? The answer as well as the reason for this are rather obvious…