Paul Keating backs Labor over dividend imputation credits
Paul Keating, the architect of the dividend imputation system, has backed Labor’s proposed reforms to abolish cash refunds for excess imputation credits and labelled the provision introduced during the Howard government as “unnecessary largesse”.
“The imputation system I introduced did not incorporate ‘cashbacks’ for those taxpayers whose average income tax rate was less than the 30 per cent corporate rate,” Mr Keating told The Australian.
Mr Keating sees the policy as essentially a return to the dividend imputation system that he introduced in the years following the Hawke government’s 1985 tax summit. The purpose of that policy, as Mr Shorten said yesterday, was to eliminate double taxation on company profits.
