Posted: 8:00 am on 13th May 2012
It is just a little more than two years since the review of Australia’s Future Tax System (AFTS, better known as the Henry review) was released to the public, with its 138 recommendations. The Gillard government, notwithstanding its enthusiastic embrace of an audacious 40% resources super profits tax at that time, was lukewarm about the Henry package as a whole. Eager to burnish its economic reform credentials, the government now…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 11th May 2012
This week we have witnessed the remorseless growth of the welfare state under the guise of the federal budget. Politicians, as unprincipled and unimaginative as ever, have found another excuse (‘pressure on families’) to use other people’s money to bribe voters with new and expanded entitlements. This has reinforced the impression that this country is still a ‘beautiful fool’s paradise’ (as the naysayers of Australia’s ‘working man’s welfare state’ of…
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Posted: 3:38 pm on 9th May 2012
Forget about the ‘return to surplus’ – or more accurately, given the size of the said surplus, the ‘return to a balanced budget’. The really big story about this budget is how it enlarges the welfare state, mainly at the expense of higher income households and the corporate sector. No doubt Swan is happy for it to be described that way, but his policies will damage the economy and longer…
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Posted: 8:50 am on 8th May 2012
As a child of divorced parents, I found myself relating to a recent article by Bettina Arndt in The Australian (‘Divorced parents decry own selfishness’). Arndt mentions how a debate has begun in Britain on whether parents who divorce are selfish – after social commentator Tim Lott admitted that although he had convinced himself that his children wouldn’t want to grow up exposed to an unhappy marriage, he no longer…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 27th April 2012
Australia’s green orchidectomy ‘A week into my Australian tour and I already I love the country and its people so much I could happily stay here forever. There’s just one small problem – well, one bloody big problem actually: the rampaging political correctness. How, in God’s name, did the robust, no-nonsense pioneer spirit of the original settlers who carved an earthly paradise out of burning hell allow itself to be…
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