This week’s 51-49 Newspoll result has caused a slight moderation in this week’s BludgerTrack poll aggregate, which blew out to 52.2-47.8 last week on the back of strong result for Labor from ReachTEL. The 0.5% shift has had a bigger-than-usual effect on the seat projection, with Labor slipping four seats to barely make it to majority government status. This amounts to one seat each in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. There are two new data points for leaders’ ratings, from Newspoll and Essential, and they’ve caused the trendlines to continue moving in the directions they were already headed – inexorably downwards for both leaders on net approval, with a gently narrowing trend on preferred prime minister.
[Never has my flabber been so completely gasted.]
Up the Murrum bloody Bidgee shooting kanga bloody roos.
“”And raising an existing tax MUST be easier than introducing a new one – particularly a new one which would require ‘government tracking devices’ being placed in all vehicles. “”
Does not apply to a DEBIT TAX, collection already in place by the banking system.
141
The problem with a Commonwealth based intelligent road use charge system (to replace a Commonwealth fuel excise) is that while it can charge different rates at different times, it cannot charge different rates for different states or different parts of different states. That would mean to charge someone driving at 8:30 am on a main road in the peak direction in one of the state capitals a rate higher than the general rate would require all road trips at the same time, except in the territories, to be charged at the higher rate (even between to farms in the middle of nowhere). There are also potential time zone issues arising from that.
State based systems could potentially be hit by the state excise ban.
Charging home fueled vehicles is the only potential good part of such a system. They do need to pay their way but the charges on roads are not paying for all the costs on roads.
Hmmm. I’m not so sure. Howard removed the indexation of petrol excise because of the political fallout of high petrol prices.
Governments take a big hit when petrol prices rise, and whenever people start the stupid talk about “45c of every litre is tax!”. Governments get very scared.
Politically if you asked people “should we raise the petrol excise by X%” vs “every 3 months you’ll get charged a modest amount based on how far you’ve driven” … I’m not sure which would actually be politically worse. Petrol pump price shock happens every time people fill up their tanks so it’s a constant irritant.
154
It is not just the politics, it is the enforcement costs and technical abilities.
As mentioned, by someone else above, “government tracking device” is a potent political attack.
Technology has become capable enough, cheap enough, reliable enough that I don’t see these practical considerations as issues now or into the future.
And we’re back to politics.
It’s a political issue, not a technical issue.
LU
There is already a land tax! its called council rates.
Jacol – ‘Australia Car Card’!
LU
Furthermore if you live in a block of units you pay owners corporation fees as well.
No land tax is needed
Government already makes enough money from property, the only area in need of reform is to restrict Negative Gearing to one property.
Charlie Pickering has quit the Project. He was probably not right wing enough for the program
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/charlie-pickering-quits-as-cohost-of-the-project-on-ten-network-20140313-hvhz6.html
156
Technology is cheap enough for ordinary people to be able to by technology to evade just about every way of tracking the distance cars drive on the roads.
TTFaB –
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
To be fair i don’t think Tom drives
159
Owners corporation fees pay for services directly to the owners and are not subject to any taxes. They are not very relevant to a taxation debate.
I think the is insufficient basis for you assertion that the government collect enough money from land tax. It is one of the least distorting and least evadable taxes around.
Tom
No, the owner corporation fees are paid by the owner to a entity which provides property management.
Its actually a cost on the owner.
If you add land tax on top of existing body corporate fees you will see increased rent.
162
If you put a box in every car, people wanting to evade the tax will get hold of boxes and work out how to hack them or put distorting technology around the sensors to block them.
163
Correct, but not relevant to a technology argument.
165
Not if the owners corporation do the management themselves.
I think we can all be glad we haven’t sunk to this level (yet, or hopefully, ever)
[As the posts note and Swanson and Vaughn reiterated, the character of Elsa is born different from other people — in this case with cryokinetic powers — but ultimately accepts who she is. Further, Elsa doesn’t have any male suitors (as her sister does), and elsewhere in the film there is a very brief moment, involving a male character saying “Hi, family” to a male adult and several children, that some viewers have interpreted as a reference to a pair of gay parents.
“I’m not a tinfoil hat conspiratorialist,” Swanson said on the show, “but you wonder sometimes if maybe there’s something very evil happening here. If I was the devil, what would I do to really foul up an entire social system and do something really, really, really evil to 5- and 6- and 7-year-olds in Christian families around America? … “I would buy Disney. If I was the devil, I would buy Disney in 1984, that’s what I would have done.”
The co-hosts also suggested that the film promotes bestiality, since the character Kristoff has an “unnatural” relationship with his pet reindeer.]
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-christian-radio-frozen-gay-agenda-20140312,0,5118956.story#ixzz2vo4wpVW3
I take it, from the lack of comments, that people here are not interested in Brandis attacking artists’ right to freedom of speech?
Tom
Under the law the owners corporation acts on behalf of the owners, the owners form the house committee and pay the fees.
These fees are factored into rents.
TTFaB –
If the device is communicating with the system it’s easy for police to do spot checks to make sure the relevant device is fitted, operational and doing its job. It’s the equivalent of rego checks or whatever.
If you make having a functional device the equivalent of having unobscured license plates it’s a total non-issue.
Speaking of unobscured license plates – video technology combined with CCTV placement would be sufficient to implement the system instead of devices fitted to every car, or validate that any fitted devices are operational.
Again, the technology and the systems are not the issue here, it is the policy and politics questions – is this good policy and are the politics workable. The technical aspects are entirely tractable.
[Tony Abbott has immediately rejected a controversial suggestion by the Productivity Commission, which would involve charging motorists for kilometres travelled rather than on fuel.]
Ah, such a conviction politician…
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-rejects-pay-per-kilometre-driving-tax-20140313-34nxy.html
ixzz2vo6yRAiv
Well that would be the ultimate user pay tax wouldn’t it.
Bugler @170
B1 Bernardi and B2 Bolt would give it a red hot go.
[Jill Singer
Hahahahaha. A friend phoned, read a quote and asked me to identify the source. I answered Vladimir Putin. It was from Andrew Bolt today.]
[The companies behind Western Australia’s major resources projects are being flooded with job applications as the state’s unemployment rate continues to surge higher.
Unemployment in the resources-driven WA economy jumped from 5.2 per cent in January to 5.9 per cent in February, its highest level in a decade.
That equates to another 11,200 West Australians looking for work in the month just ended, taking the number of unemployed to 84,300.]
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-business/wa-miners-flooded-with-job-applications-20140313-34obp.html
Poroti,
They can try 😉 If someone says “I’m not a tinfoil hat conspiratorialist, but …”, you know it’s going to be good
So, an Habib is running in the SA state election.
This is what Andrew Bolt had to say about another Habib, Mamdouh Habib’s run for the NSW parliament on Thursday, February 01, 2007:
[A Socialist Alliance activist is behind the NSW election campaign of former Guatanamo Bay inmate Mamdouh Habib. Here’s yet more evidence of the close bond the far Left has formed with the Islamist Right, . . .]
and, after repeating unproven allegations against Habib in an attempt to further besmirch him,
[Habib may of course be guilty of nothing but big-mouthing (and claiming social security benefits while perfectly able to travel to Pakistan to explore, he claimed, business opportunities). Yet by choosing him to help, the Socialist Party’s members show again that totalitarians tend to have more in common with each other than with those who prefer freedom. The Left and Right are siblings.]
A year later, March 18, 2008, Bolt was at it again, quoting Gerard Henderson under the headline “Don’t tell them Habib fibbed” after NSW Supreme Court, Peter McClellan, Chief Judge at Common Law, delivered his judgment in Habib v Nationwide News Pty Ltd.:
[. . . Mamdouh Habib couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about being a victim of the US’s war on terror.]
Unsurprisingly, both Bolt and Henderson were silent in 2011 when an Egyptian intelligence officer named
[“an Australian official who witnessed the torture of Sydney man Mamdouh Habib in Guantanamo Bay has been revealed as the trigger for a hushed-up government payout to Mr Habib and a high-level investigation.”]
Regarding Bolt’s outrage at the “Can you trust Habib?” pamphlet, I can’t help but agree with these comments:
[But then you’d have to ask; why is it racist? It’s just a name. It wouldn’t be racist if her name was Smith. So why is Habib ‘racist’?
There is a reason. It’s because Bolt himself has spent years spinning his Islamophobic propaganda nonsense demonising Islamic people and associating them with Arabic and Arabic-sounding names.
In other words, if Carolyn Habib wants to blame anyone for the racist connotations associated with the picture of the wall and words written on it, she should blame Andrew Bolt.
Only another racist could see any racist connotations in it.]
Good comment kezza2
Kezza,
Hasn’t Husic faced racist campaigns against him by the Liberals in Chifley and Greenway? Did Bolt have anything to say about that, or is it okay because he’s actuallya Bosniak Muslim?
Dreadful jobs figures for most States.
[The number of people unemployed increased by 9,800 people to 742,200 in February, the ABS reported.]
Another 10 thousand souls on the Abbott scrap heap.
kezza2
Agree with fredex. Great observation
Bolt was quite right about Mamdouh Habib.
Zoomster @147: I mostly agree. As with other mining, we need to get the balance right, in this case between the miners and the farmers as well as the environment. Certainly we don’t want to listen just to the proponents of CSG – they just want to get the stuff out as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Of course, the coal mining/electricity generating areas of our country tend to be so ghastly that no one visits them, and so we can all bask in the idea that our present electricity is produced in ways that – apart from emissions — doesn’t hurt the environment Well, not quite. Consider the Hunter and Illawarra regions of NSW.
Ru
According to economists commentary of late, the Oz economy is on the improve and has turned a corner. This is despite the recent negative surveys
[I take it, from the lack of comments, that people here are not interested in Brandis attacking artists’ right to freedom of speech?]
fredex
I heard it last night on PM I think. Was disgusted but what more can we expect from this Govt. It seems to be we are now in lala land with ‘do what we want .. or else’. Brandis is living up to my expectations of him. Those who think he’s atill a moderate need a rethink.
It’s only 6 months in and I’m already suffering fatigue with their messages.
fredex
The idea of George Brandis penalising arts organisations which refuse funding from corporate sponsors is par for the course.
Zoomster I answered ‘not sure’ to a few questions because I know so little about CSG apart from the doccos from the US.
There are National 2 camps around here. One group (those closest to the proposed mining) don’t want it, the others just don’t think about it. However there are lots of waterways around here and if there was a chance of them being polluted then I’m against it. It’s good beef and dairy cattle country with lots of free range chicken as well. The free range is really that – they are locked up only at night.
We’re on top of the 2nd Aquifer for the area here and a large Rubbish Tip has recently been built nearby. The community fought against it for years. The base is supposed to be leakproof. We’ll find out in a few years if the estimated 190 truckloads in and out a day will do any damage to the Aquifer.
A leader of the Svobada Party in Kiev give a fascist salute …and all this after a EU warning of the dangers of this party
see pic….http://www.moonofalabama.org/e
Taxing by distance travelled has the effect of making travel class-based. We have enough of that already with our inefficient public transport systems. Poor people are confined close to their homes while people with money can travel anywhere they want. It is a sort of economics-based sedation.
I’ve been busy and haven’t dropped by for a day or two.
Please tell me if I reading the tenor of the debate on here correctly.
A number of posters seem to be proposing an increase in fuel excise as an alternative to an increase in (or extension of) the GST because that would be somehow fairer to people on lower incomes?!!!??
As far as I can see it, an increase in fuel excise would hit people on lower incomes at least as hard as an increase in the GST, if not harder. It would directly affect supermarket prices – including for the currently exempt fresh food items – as the cost of delivery by truck is more or less a fixed cost for all supermarkets which can’t really be subjected to competitive downward pressure.
It would clearly also affect all people on lower incomes who drive a motor vehicle. Unlike GST increases, which can easily be compensated through social security/taxation up to whatever income level you like – fuel increases are not easily compensated for. The amount each person needs to drive a motor vehicle – or whether they need one at all – is affected by issues like where they live, whether or not they have children (and how many), any physical disability they might have, etc.
Left wing folks like the majority of PBers ought to get over their visceral antipathy to the GST. Yes, I know John Howard introduced it, but you all need to get over that.
If adequate compensation is given to those on lower incomes, the GST is a very fair way of increasing the tax take. It’s much harder for higher income earners to minimise their GST payments than their income tax.
The current exemption of health and education expenses – the benefit of which flows overwhelmingly to higher income earners using private hospitals and education services – is an inequity that should be addressed. The fresh food exemption probably doesn’t matter so much, and avoids the problem of how to collect it from market and roadside sellers, etc.
So, to sum up, I would personally favour an increase in GST to 15% plus a broadening of coverage to include health and education expenses. Unless something like this happens soon, state government services will start to become so seriously downgraded as to produce major problems for our nation.
BTW, I also think income tax rates should be lifted as well – but good luck to any political party which tries to do so – and applied to superannuation pensions. I would also have a serious look at family trusts in which the majority of gross income going in to the trust does not come from trading revenue generated by a family business such as a farm or a retail venture.
I wouldn’t touch land tax negative gearing on properties (negatively geared share purchases might be worth a look).
I think a capital gains tax on owner-occupied housing is seriously worth looking at as a means of bringing back death duties surreptitiously. The person on whom the tax is imposed can deduct the cost of another house purchased within the next 1-2 years. If the house is sold as part of breaking up the estate of a deceased person, the tax is imposed in full. Rules would be set in place to make it impossible for people to gift their houses, or sell them at below market prices, to family or friends.
The imputed income from owner-occupied housing could be included in calculating entitlements to a wide range of benefits: particularly in the areas of health and aged care, which are heavily used by older people who are living by themselves in very large dwellings.
It’s all pretty harsh stuff, but we are eventually going to have to do soemthing.
@GuardianAus: George Brandis threatens Sydney Biennale over Transfield ‘blackballing’ http://t.co/Ne0jWN5bOT
May be par for the course for Brandis and team Abbott. Not for most Australians.
deb – Unless the guy was saluting in a very heavy snowstorm then the link just brings up a white screen for me.
MB,
[If you add land tax on top of existing body corporate fees you will see increased rent.]
Rent is constrained by renter’s ability to pay. It cannot go up unless incomes go up or a lot of other things get cheaper. All that can move is rental yields, and therefore (in an efficient market) property prices – down. This is what happens whenever you attack the surplus earned by economic rentiers – the value of their rent-collection vehicle decreases.
[There is already a land tax! its called council rates.]
Yes there is, but what rate do you pay? I’m talking about a significant increase to the land tax rate, in order to free the states from Fed control and in place of an increase in the GST.
[Government already makes enough money from property, the only area in need of reform is to restrict Negative Gearing to one property.]
Stamp duty is a seriously distortionary tax that prevents the efficient allocation of one of the most basic resources in our society, shelter. It is also quite variable, so the revenue from it to State Govts is less predictable and depends on the property market. It should be abolished and replaced by a (bigger) land tax.
Negative gearing is a tax minimisation rort, and your suggestion of limiting losses to one property is a good one.
BH @188
You’re late to the party, I muted Abbott the moment he came onto TV or the radio 2 months into his leadership role for the opposition.
Puff, the Magic Dragon.
Also the outer suburban commuters will likely be hit more than those from “leafy inner suburbs” so a bit more “class bias”.
sedation = segragation
Guilty verdict as expected
@Simon_Cullen: Interesting – Judge twice stopped short of declaring Morcombe mistrial http://t.co/HlbkNz79BK via @ABCNews