Let’s face it, Labor and gabfests go together like a horse and carriage. Who can forget that gabfest of all gabfests, the 2020 Summit, convened by the Ruddster in 2014? (I must confess to attending that shindig, but I quickly add that I took an early mark because there was only so much a sensible woman can tolerate.)

In Albo’s first term, there was the Jobs and Skills Summit convened by then workplace relations minister, B2, aka Tony Burke. It was a complete stitch up of the business community whose representatives naively expected something constructive to emerge from their attendance. In fact, they were just played for fools by the newly elected government. However, showing up at these staged get-togethers connotes a degree of co-ownership for whatever emerges at the end.

B2 and his union mates were always going to ram through a series of pro-union changes to legislation, including some that were explicitly ruled out during the election campaign. The most egregious example was the scope for multi-employer agreements which Jimbo had rejected out of hand prior to the election in 2022.

The rinse-and-repeat tactic was always going to be used by the triumphant Albanese government in its second term. But the next high-level meeting is being scaled back with the size limitations of the room used by cabinet determining the number of attendees. The competition to attend will be fierce – not because the substance of the discussion will be meaningful, but rather there will be bragging rights attached to an invitation.

Ostensibly, the talks are to be about productivity, with Albo having dropped this proposal into Jimbo’s lap at the Prime Minister’s first post-election sermon at the National Press Club. In turn, Jimbo had no option but to act on this ‘helpful’ suggestion, but our chief money man intends to shape the agenda and the attendees to his liking.

The word is that he has even dropped productivity from the title of the productivity roundtable. The term ‘reform’ will be used instead because reform is an extremely ambiguous term. His reform is my damaging policy.

The last thing Jimbo wants is for the chosen invitees to have too many independent ideas. After all, the communique will be written before the actual event. By setting three unworkable criteria, he will doubtless achieve what he is aiming for – some talking points and a small number of modest ‘reforms’ that the government always intended on implementing. The criteria are as follows:

– The ideas must be practical, not just theoretically interesting;

– There must be consensus on the chosen ideas;

– The outcome must be budget-neutral at worst, preferably budget-positive.

This really narrows the field because policy changes always involve winners and losers. Gosh if they didn’t, they would have been implemented years ago. The key is to ensure that the gains are sufficiently large (and ongoing) to ensure that the losers can be compensated, directly or indirectly.

Jimbo’s hero, Paul Keating, understood this point very well. There was always a noticeable rump of detractors of the policies implemented by the Hawke/Keating government, including financial deregulation, tariff reductions, privatisation and the shift to enterprise bargaining. Ironically, Albo himself was a knocker of what he considered an experiment in unalloyed neo-liberalism, along with his boss at that time, the unreconstructed Trot, Tom Uren.

Even so, Jimbo has in the meantime let several cats out of the bag as the usual suspects air their views on their preferred ‘reforms’, including the architect of the discredited mining tax, Ken Henry, former Treasury secretary. The list is long and generally self-serving.

It’s important to understand here that for most lefties the term ‘tax reform’ is simply code for raising more tax revenue, particularly from those with the highest incomes and those with substantial wealth. The fact that the top 10 per cent of income earners currently generate over half of all income tax revenue is quickly overlooked. In fact, this percentage of revenue is now higher than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, watch this space. The suggestions will emerge like the Iguazu Falls – a cut in the capital gains ‘discount’; limits on negative gearing; reductions in franking credits; higher taxes on trusts; inheritance taxes; and higher superannuation taxation – more than Jimbo’s 30-per-cent earnings tax on accounts greater than $3 million.

There will also be a lot of chatter about increasing the rate of the GST as well as eliminating some exempt goods and services. Fresh food, financial services, health insurance, medical bills, private school fees and water/sewerage are currently exempt from the GST. There would doubtless be a hullabaloo were any changes made to the GST.

There is also the complication that all GST revenue is directed to the states and territories. Jimbo is unlikely to wear the political pain of changing the GST so the states and territories can receive the additional dough. Just expect the GST to form a major part of the public discussion in the next few weeks, although it’s unlikely that much space will be given to the topic at the shindig.

Another fave of the tax reform/let’s raise more tax revenue crowd is the shift to land tax and away from stamp duties on property sales. There are several major impediments here including the fact that the states and territories have carriage of property taxes, not the federal government, and stamp duty is a major source of revenue for all states and territories apart from the Australian Capital Territory.

Eliminating stamp duties is seen as an efficiency move because people become more amenable to sell up and shift if they are not hit with a large lump sum impost – or so the theory goes. By replacing stamp duties with ongoing land tax, state and territory governments have a guaranteed source of revenue and the rate of tax can always be ratcheted up if the revenue is seen as inadequate.

People cannot avoid this tax as long as they continue to own the affected property, something that really appeals to the ‘we need more tax revenue’ mob.

However, there will be significant loss of revenue in the short term from phasing out stamp duties. Given that the fiscal positions of most state governments are parlous, with the one exception of Western Australia, this is probably an insurmountable hurdle unless Jimbo uses federal dollars to compensate the states, which he would be disinclined to do.

For those who have recently purchased properties and paid stamp duty, it would be unfair to hit them with land tax. A long transition is inevitable were stamp duties to be phased out. The fact that the limited experiment with the optional elimination of stamp duties for first home buyers by the Perrottet government in New South Wales points to the political difficulty of making such a change stick.

My guess is the Jimbo’s small get-together will amount to very little apart from some vague proposals about reducing red tape and improving approval times, particularly for energy and building projects. The Albanese government doesn’t have to take any notice of policy wannabes, and it won’t.