We’ve all heard it. The confident declaration by a friend, relative or work colleague that the country is being ruined by all the dole bludgers out there; people living all too well off the money we earn and they don’t. The problem is, it’s just not true. You know the dole and other allowances paid to the unemployed are too low when the Business Council of Australia and one of...
Is anybody else shocked by the revelations coming out of the Royal Commission into Banking and Financial Services? Our banks and financial service industries are amongst the most profitable organisations in the world and they handsomely remunerate their staff. Yet it seems that it’s not enough. I find it extraordinary, because it is economically so unnecessary. At the time of Jesus people...
One of the most thrilling moments I have ever witnessed occurred during the Live8 concert in 2005. A giant screen displayed footage from the 1980s famine in Ethiopia. It was distressing. Mothers with eyes evacuated of hope cradling emaciated babies; children too weak to play sitting quietly on the dusty ground surrounded by death. The camera zoomed in on one baby girl, gaunt, listless and just...
Sandy and I have watched the last few seasons of House Rules, a TV reality show in which couples renovate each other’s homes. What strikes me is that the attraction of the TV show is not the quality of the renovations produced – if it was we would not be watching amateurs do their thing – but the human drama. Will the couple whose home has been renovated like what they see? Will the...
It’s not uncommon to hear people in our society grumbling about excessive welfare payments to those on lower incomes nor to hear the opposite claim that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Data just released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that neither of these assertions is true. It shows total after-tax income for households adjusted for...
Our new treasurer, Scott Morrison, stated this week that “you can’t tax your way to surplus”. It’s become something of an orthodoxy on the conservative side of politics, but when you stop to think about it, it’s a ridiculous statement. The only way the government gains revenue is by taxing people, goods and services, and businesses, so the only way the government...
It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon that threatens to become uncomfortably cold. I sit in a lounge outside the Honeysuckle Hotel in Newcastle’s tourist precinct. Twenty metres away a one man band is playing Chuck Berry songs to which a group of five fifty-somethings from the Eagle Rock Dance Club are jiving. Beyond them small groups of people gather around a slew of vintage cars that are on display...
With all the hype about “budget repair” I had made the assumption that government spending was going down. Turns out I am wrong. At the same time that our government is demanding we slash and burn things like foreign aid, it is planning on spending $14 billion dollars more next year than it did this year, and projects that by the year 2018-19 it will be spending $79 billion more than...
Having spent more than a decade of my life campaigning for increases in both the quantity and the quality of the Australian aid program, it has been devastating to see the aid budget slashed by more than 20%, the greatest single decrease in the history of the program. I have travelled to a number of countries with large numbers of people living in extreme poverty and seen the amazing impacts that...
Put ten Australians in a room and ask them if they pay too much tax and you’re likely to find everyone agreeing, “why yes, I do pay too much tax.” None of us likes paying tax, but are we really paying too much? Here are three ways you can answer that question. How much should we pay? At the end of the day we need to pay enough tax to pay for the services we want. At the moment...