Before the last election, Labor detailed a suite of policies that Josh Frydenberg said would amount to $387 billion in “new taxes” over the next decade.

Like everything Josh Frydenberg says, this was a lie.

$230 billion of this figure came from Labor’s opposition to the Coalition’s plan to raise the 19% tax bracket threshold from $41,000 to $45,000 from 2022, then flatten tax brackets from 2024 so all taxpayers earning between $45,000 and $200,000 pay a marginal rate of 30%.

The foolishness of locking in tax cuts years in advance is now being rammed home.  Labor sensibly said at the time that we should wait to see how the economy was faring to see if we could afford it.

Opposing tax cuts can hardly be described as “new taxes”.

The next largest revenue measure was $57 billion from ending taxpayer funded cash rebates for self-funded retirees  with excess franking credits.  This does not amount to anyone paying more tax.  It just means the tax paid by companies would actually go to the government rather than being handed back as a gift to shareholders who pay no tax (pensioners excluded).

Labor also looked to raise $34bn through changes to superannuation tax concessions including lowering the high income super contribution threshold to $200,000 and lowering the annual non-concessional contributions cap to $75,000.

An end to negative gearing for existing properties – the ability to claim a tax deduction from a loss-making investment property (grandfathered so existing investors are not impacted) – and halving the capital tax gains concession from 50% to 25% for assets purchased after 1 January 2020, would have raised another $31 billion.  Negative gearing deductions would still apply to new properties thus helping to encourage construction.

Labor wanted to raise $27 billion by imposing a standard minimum 30% tax rate on discretionary/family trust distributions, which are often used by wealthy Australians to minimise their tax.  You would be hard pressed to find a Coalition politician who does not use this tax loophole.

Another $6.5 billion would be raised by extending Abbott’s deficit levy, effectively increasing the top marginal rate to 47%.

Capping deductions for accountants’ fees and managing tax affairs would raise another $2 billion.  It is particularly galling to see very wealthy people pay accountants millions to reduce their taxable income to nothing.

These were all responsible suggestions aimed at getting rich people to pay their share – something that will never happen under a Coalition government.

You can be certain that, when we come out the other side of this crisis, it will be the little people who will be hit again with austerity measures and attacks on welfare whilst the wealthy will have all their loopholes fiercely protected.

Or we can vote Labor.

By 2353NM  

And that has nothing to do with fuel marketing cycles that seem to afflict larger cities around the country, the cost of importing fuel because the multi-national refining companies have determined it is not economic to produce fuel in Australia or any one of the hundreds of other theories of why it now costs more than ever to fill up the car. It is all to do with politics.

In 2007, the ALP Government as a part of the process to address the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ AKA climate change, decreed that there should be some form of regulation of vehicle fuel consumption, as well as some work on the emissions coming out of the exhaust pipes of the Australian vehicle fleet. We all know what happened to the ‘greatest moral challenge’. In 2015, the Coalition Government committed to addressing the issue. We’re still waiting. The Conversation goes in to far greater detail than we have space for here, but suffice to say if Australia had emissions and fuel consumption targets for our vehicle fleet we would be joining about 80% of the rest of the world. The Conversation also suggests the amount of money that we as a nation wasted since 2015 was $1 Billion because there are no fuel efficiency standards in this country.

We shouldn’t really be surprised. Abbott and the Coalition came to power in 2013 on a number of lies including the $100 lamb roasts and Whyalla being wiped off the map because of ‘the carbon tax’. This was followed by the unwinding of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme put into place by the minority Gillard Government. Prime Minister Turnbull, who at one stage apparently believed the imperative of acting to reduce emissions was rolled by his own party (again) because of it. Morrison installed a climate sceptic into the role of Environment Minister, who when confronted with the fact that greenhouse gases are actually rising in Australia made some excuse that our rising totals are offset by falls elsewhere because they are using gas produced in Australia for power generation and other previously high emissions generating industries. Apart from being bunkum, The Monthly daily email on Friday 7 June reports that

This data was supposed to be released to the public last Friday by the office of the energy minister, Angus Taylor. It was instead leaked to The Australian on Wednesday, when the news cycle was swamped with reports of the recent AFP raids on the media.

You’d have to wonder if the AFP will be bashing down the door at The Australian’s office in about 18 months like they did to the ABC and News Corp’s Political Reporter Annika Smethurst recently. Nah — probably will never happen.

If you think the money we are losing at the petrol pump is obscene, in the words of the generic TV gadget salesperson ‘but wait, there’s more’! If Australia adopted the same energy and resources efficiency measures as Germany, it is estimated that collectively we would save $7.7Billion per year, actually be half way to meeting our Paris commitment and potentially being in the position of not having to replace an ageing coal fired power station when it became uneconomical to run. It’s not a new idea:

California in the 1970s generated the equivalent of two new nuclear power plants of energy, just by improving the efficiency of fridges.

It’s probably obvious to most now that the Coalition government’s claim of better managing a strong economy during the recent federal election campaign was another in a long list of lies perpetrated by the A(bbott)T(urnbull)M(orrison) Government. As The Guardian’s Greg Jericho succinctly put it, ‘The Government has run the economy into the ground’. Although they claim they will be ‘meeting the [somewhat modest] targets’ of the Paris climate change protocol, they have demonstrated through their lack of genuine action and engagement they don’t give a toss about it. As they can’t even achieve a target in an area they claim they are good at — namely running a strong economy — why would the Paris targets be considered more important?

Luckily, the states and local governments around Australia are doing the heavy lifting that is required. States have the right to introduce energy efficiency standards in relation to buildings and similar infrastructure as well as funding businesses to improve their efficiency. New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT and South Australia have done so. Even in the areas around Central Queensland where the Carmichael Mine is commonly seen to be the saviour of jobs and lifestyles, there are some leaving the mining industry to join the solar power ‘revolution’. The Queensland Government recently hosted a Climate Reality Conference where the Keynote speaker was former US Presidential contender Al Gore. As a part of the Conference, Ernst & Young prepared a report suggesting that there was considerable hope for creating opportunities in industries

such as solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries,” it says.

It also points out Queensland has the “critical” mineral reserves of raw earths: neodymium, cobalt, nickel and lithium used in mobile phones and other emerging technologies.

Al Gore (who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work in raising awareness of the need for action on climate change) discussed at the conference that the ‘lower’ levels of government are making far greater efforts in respect to managing climate change than the federal governments, both here and in the USA.

“I showed a slide (on Wednesday) showing a world-class electric-vehicle-charging station manufactured here in Brisbane,” he said.

That Brisbane company was Tritium Energy, recently listed as one of the world’s 10 most innovative companies and part of Queensland’s emerging electric super-highways. It was an example, Mr Gore said, of companies looking to the post-fossil-fuel era.

“Indeed there will be hundreds of thousands of jobs created here in Australia once the decision is finalised to make Australia the renewable energy superpower of the 21st century,” he said.

The reality is Coalition politicians are doing as much to reduce the effects of climate change as the current US Republicans. The US Defence Department, which has some serious concerns about climate change making a lot of their ‘assets’ unusable — including the site that controls GPS satellites around the world — has resorted to

get climate change adaptation past politicians, by talking about “climate in much the way eighth graders talk about sex — with code words and winks and suggestive language”.

“They know better than to talk about [climate change] directly and forcefully, lest they anger the elected officials who fund their projects and who believe that climate change is not a problem.”

Says a lot about the intelligence of a lot of the conservative politicians with vested interests on both sides of the Pacific — doesn’t it?

What do you think?

At one stage during the election campaign, either Scott Morrison or Josh Frydenberg hinted at their intention to begin paying down the national debt if they were re-elected.

It is a sad reflection on our media that no one thought to ask how this might happen. If they had, it’s likely they would have exposed a simple, albeit inconvenient truth, firstly about how that debt is created and secondly, how it is retired.

Currency-issuing governments don’t need to acquire debt, but given that the funding of deficit spending is a fact of life in Australia, we should all know just what the procedure is, and how it works.

To fund deficit spending, the government issues bonds in its own currency. Various entities, both here and overseas, buy these bonds because they have money they want to invest and bonds are considered safe investments.

The bonds are issued for a specific length of time (3, 5, 10 or 20 years), the money received for them is held in an account at the Reserve Bank, interest is paid twice yearly and when the term expires, it is returned to the bondholder.

Under current arrangements, when the Australian Office of Financial Management (AOFM), anticipates that the consolidated revenue account is running low, it will issue a bond sale tender to meet the expected shortfall.

There are other considerations such as yields and so on and the bondholders can, if they choose, sell their bonds on the secondary bond market and even make a profit from it. But that’s another story.

So when and how can this process reflect a reduction in government debt accumulation? Well, it can’t. As long as governments spend more than they collect in taxation, this is the process that plays out. It doesn’t have to, but governments choose to do it this way. It’s a political choice.

In some cases, when a bond issue matures, the government will issue a new tender just to cover the amount being repaid to bond holders. New tenders can be issued to cover maturing issues. It sounds stupid, but what can one do.

From this we can see that debt is accumulated to offset deficit spending and old debt is being retired and replaced with new debt. But what happens when government produces surpluses? Does the AOFM stop issuing tenders for bonds? That would seem to be the logical thing to do, wouldn’t it?

The last time this occurred was in the early 2000s when John Howard famously and incorrectly claimed that his government had paid down all debt.

They had, in fact, reach a point where net debt was thought to be zero, but some gross debt (bonds still on issue), was still owing. Gross debt is what interest is paid on. Howard and Costello wanted to shut down future bond sales but, as it happened, they continued to issue bonds even when the government was producing surpluses. Why?

The answer to that question is best explained by Philip Baker’s article written for the Evatt Foundation in November 2002 where he writes…

“Commonwealth bonds, which the government issues when it borrows money, are the safest of all securities. For many individuals who are labouring to pay off credit cards and mortgages, zero government debt may sound like a good thing. But it could also create a dilemma for big and small investors because it would result in a real shortage of risk-free, safe-haven assets for superannuation savings. The remaining government bonds on issue would be scarcer and more expensive for investors. Fund managers would be forced to invest in riskier corporate bonds or send the money offshore – at the very time the government has increased to 9 per cent the amount of an individual’s salary that must be invested in superannuation.”

So the Howard government continued to issue bonds because the bond traders needed them as leverage against a shrinking and less-safe market. This implies that bond sales have nothing to do with government debt.

So where does this leave Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg who desperately want to be seen to be paying down debt, a debt which in reality, does not exist? If the government were to cease issuing bonds it would make no difference to the nation’s fiscal balance. But it would incur the wrath of the bond traders and we couldn’t have that, could we?

Of course, none of this needs to be thought about while we continue to have a negative fiscal balance, i.e. deficit spending, and with the economy currently in a downward spiral, that situation will continue for some time yet. Despite Morrison and Frydenberg claiming we are back in the black, we are not. Not this year, or the next, or likely even the one after that.

And, just for the record, here is where the gross debt position stood back when the adults took over*** and where it is today:

May. 2019. $541 billion

September. 2016. $420 billion

September 2013. $257 billion ***

August . 2007. $58 billion

So much for a debt and deficit disaster. And where are those fearless journalists who could take on the Prime Minister and Treasurer when they make deceptive statements about paying down debt?

Perhaps an intimidatory raid on the ABC might keep them quiet for a while.

Vassals rarely question. If they do, criticism is limited and usually restrained behind closed doors. The Australian Prime Minister’s visit to Washington during February was marked by the usual and expected kowtows, blessings and awkward acceptances.

The visit was also marked by what an Australian media outlet claimed was “Australia’s most significant delegation ever to visit the United States to build trade connections with US governors.” Keeping Malcolm Turnbull company were four state premiers wishing to wade into the spectacle.

Trade Minister Steve Ciobo was glowing at the efforts of Australia’s ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey. The latter, he claimed, had been prancing before the National Governors’ Association in an effort to focus interest on Washington’s antipodean satrap. “All governors of all the states come together in the United States to talk about their pathway forward, to build linkages … we’ll put a strong focus on our trade and investment relationship.”

The visit left nobody in any doubt about what would happen should the US find itself in yet another conflict. Australia, with unquestioning, conditioned automatism, would rush to the side of its imperial sponsor.

At the press conference of February 24 for the two leaders, President Donald Trump did a bit of buttering up. “The United States and Australia are currently honouring the 100 years of mateship. The term that you use very beautifully, Prime Minister.”

Mateship, in the Australian sense, is a rubbery term, one of such elasticity it loses form when confronted. Do mates turn over the furniture of another’s house, cajole and hector? Is acceptable servitude a function of mateship? The failure of “mateship” to make its incorrigibly vague way into the preamble of Australia’s dry Constitutional document was a moment to celebrate.

Trump, however, was on form. As he does so often, he personalised the political. At the press gathering were Australians Greg Norman and billionaire Anthony Pratt, both of whom were asked to stand up by the president. The latter was singled out for his $2 billion investment in box making factories in the US. “But he only did that if Trump won the election, I think, is that the correct statement Anthony?” Pratt expressed due agreement, having previously proclaimed an inevitable renaissance in the US economy: “100 percent correct!”

Trump had other offerings. The Imperial Chief was proving generous. “This afternoon, I’m pleased to announce that the United States will name the Littoral Combat Ship 30 the USS Canberra in honour of an Australian cruiser lost fighting alongside the US Navy during World War II.”

Such offerings do come at a price. Turnbull was thanked by the same figure who has, at various stages, threatened North Korea with annihilation. The deployment of Australian forces as pro-US dots of global engagement, including Afghanistan and forces marshalled against ISIS, was duly mentioned. Trump was also grateful for the prime minister’s “strong voice for peace and stability across the entire Indo-Pacific region,” a less than subtle hint that the vassal was doing its appropriate policing for Mother Empire.

Trump was also mindful of Canberra’s role in his coarse policy towards North Korea. “Australia is one of our closest partners in our campaign of maximum pressure to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula.” No sign there of sober counsel, a point then shown by Trump’s call that the US and Australia “must continue to stand together to prevent that brutal dictatorship from threatening the world with nuclear devastation.”

When it came to Turnbull’s turn to make a few remarks, the satrap’s obedience was clear. Closeness was stressed, the sort expected in disorienting infatuation. Indeed, matters in terms of the security alliance kept pushing both Washington and Canberra closer, a sort of cementing embrace. “The cooperation is more intense than it has ever been. Whether we are standing up for freedom’s cause in the Middle East, in our region around the world combating terrorism.”

The trip also marked the tired, forced iteration of that tried, and failed experiment: tax cuts for the mighty non-personality known as the corporation. In Turnbull’s words at the press gathering, “We have secured some tax reforms in terms of reducing company tax but not as much as we need to do.” The Australian government had been “inspired … by your success in securing the passage of the tax reforms through the Congress.”

Having learned nothing from such voodoo economics as “trickle down”, figures such as Turnbull and Trump have decided that corporations are heart and soul of a nation, while the rest can stand aside. The economic show room is only big for so many, and citizens do not count.

Despite an initially awkward start to the relationship, it is clear that Turnbull has found the customary niche all Australian prime ministers eventually do with the United States, firmly wedged in the machinery and bosom of empire, with its follies, miscalculations and limitations.

When we hear that a politician has abused his/her expense entitlements, or that federal cabinet has decided to carry out a postal survey costing $120 million, we throw our hands up in despair and cry out, “that’s taxpayers’ money you’re wasting,” and ask why isn’t this money being spent to build a hospital or a road or better still, to give aged pensioners a bit extra?

What will it take to convince people that the emotive outcry, “it’s taxpayers’ money” is a fallacy and a fraud? What does it take to have our ignorant politicians and economists be properly informed?

It’s not taxpayer’s money, it’s government-issued money, being returned to its rightful owners. It’s money created out of thin air by the government central bank and placed into circulation for the benefit of the communities for which it was intended. Then, as reliable as a boomerang and in the passage of time, it finds its way back into government hands, its rightful owners, via taxation.

You would think a process as simple as that, would be easy to explain, easy to understand and not be so deceptively turned on its head so as to make people think it works the other way round. But that’s what politicians and economists are doing. It is utterly dishonest of those who should know better and needs to be exposed for the deception that it is.

The process by which this deception is able to flourish is based on a decades old mindset that sounds simple enough. We are told that we pay our taxes and the government then spends that money to build infrastructure and improve services.

Furthermore we are told that when the government spends more than it collects in taxes, it has to borrow to make up the difference. We call it, the deficit, which then becomes part of the gross national debt that must be repaid over time. We are told that if it is not kept in check, it could threaten our grandchildren’s future.

It all sounds logical. After all, that is how we conduct our personal and business affairs. Our personal deficit spending, mostly on the credit card and the mortgage, must be repaid. So it stands to reason that government debts also must be repaid.

The government, we are told, is the same as a household, only much bigger. But it’s all balderdash! The problem is, the government is not the same as a household; our personal financial management, our household management, is not the same as the government’s financial management. The difference is simple. We can’t issue money. Only the federal government can do that.

But the message isn’t cutting through. The mantra, “it’s taxpayer’s money” keeps bobbing up anywhere and everywhere a politician or economist, a bureaucrat, or a radio or television talk show host has a microphone within reach.

They all keep going on, saying the same thing, over and over again and it’s simply not true.

We might think that our taxes are used to provide government services, infrastructure, pensions, etc., but the reality is, they are used for nothing. They are removed from circulation and once removed, they simply evaporate.

One would have thought, given the exposure of this accounting identity to a broader audience over the past five years that the media would have been all over it, by now. But such is not the case. The media, deliberately or ignorantly, continue to sponsor the ‘taxpayers’ money’ myth.

Our politicians have made such a political football of it that cutting through with the truth, explaining how things actually work, has been rendered near impossible.

These days, as soon as one mentions the word, deficit, whistles start blowing in our heads. Up goes the cry, “They’re spending too much, borrowing too much, paying interest and mortgaging our grandchildren’s future. We’ll go broke!”

It’s so unnecessary. It’s a reflection of our collective mediocrity as well as our ignorance that this absurd situation is allowed to continue. How does it serve the common good to have people believe something that is simply not true?

Yes, we encourage our children to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny but at least, as the children grow older, they work it out. Why then do we continue to believe the “taxes are for spending” myth? Why, as adults, haven’t we worked it out?

All government spending is new money created out of thin air. Taxation serves to give our currency value, so we will use it, and also to help control inflation by withdrawing it from circulation. It’s just not that hard to understand.

It’s not taxpayer’s money. It’s government money. The taxpayer is paying it back to the government so the government can spend more without causing inflation.

While everyone reels from Turnbull’s captain’s pick to neuter the Dutton threat by handing him unprecedented power, this is one of many actions by Turnbull to shore up his own job.

In August 2015, just before Turnbull staged his leadership coup, he offered Queensland conservative powerbroker and LNP President Bruce McIver a new job as a board director at Australia Post.

McIver announced his resignation from the LNP executive on September 7, a week before Turnbull challenged for the leadership.

On 10 December 2015, McIver’s appointment was confirmed without going through the selection process required of previous ­appointees.

A few days later, despite having retired as LNP president in September, McIver used his influence and vote on the LNP executive to help block federal Liberal MP Ian Macfarlane’s attempted defection to the Nationals.

McIver was at the infamous Rolex dinner before the 2013 election, hosted by dumped Minister Stuart Robert, where Chinese mogul Li Ruipeng met with then Opposition leader Tony Abbott, then shadow resources minister Ian Macfarlane, and Liberal donor Paul Marks, the man Robert accompanied to China to lend support to a mining deal.

McIver is also a longtime friend and business partner of Clive Palmer, acting as a director for Asia Pacific Shipping Enterprises and four related companies. Queensland LNP senator Barry O’Sullivan, the parliamentarian who owns 33 properties, is a long-time McIver ally,

No wonder they avoided a selection process.

In February 2016, the day after his first board meeting with Australia Post, McIver headlined a Liberal Party fundraiser despite government guidelines requiring directors of government business enterprises to “in undertaking their business, avoid activities that could give rise to questions about their political impartiality”.

Also on the Australia Post board is former senator Michael Ronaldson, a Turnbull ally who, in response to being left out of the Ministry, announced his retirement in December 2015, paving the way for the IPA’s James Paterson to fill the casual vacancy.

After leaving parliament in March 2016, Ronaldson, the former minister for veterans’ affairs, began his gig as an Australia Post director two months later.

In late 2014, Turnbull, as Communications Minister, also appointed Dominique Fisher, the wife of former Liberal Party federal president Alan Stockdale, to the board though her selection was through an executive search process conducted by an independent recruitment agency.

Unlike Vanessa Guthrie, former head of the Minerals Council, who Turnbull appointed to the board of the ABC despite her not even making the short list from the independent selection committee, or the IPA’s Tim Wilson who was gifted a role at the Human Rights Commission, at the expense of the very competent Graeme Innes, purely because he was being groomed by George Brandis, as shown by his premature resignation as soon as a safe Liberal seat became available.

And if you have a disgruntled ex-treasurer who may want revenge, send him out of the country to the top job in America and give him a nanny and housekeeper thrown in.

Add in a lazy million or two towards a cash-strapped campaign, and the power bill should be well and truly paid for.

Thursday 11 May 2017

After four years of denial Scott Morrison has finally admitted that the Government actually did have a revenue problem. Just when he went through this cathartic experience is unknown. Further, in the absence of any ideas of his own, he conceded that Labor did, and the easiest way around his economic problems was simply to steal Labor’s.

And in an openly fraudulent manner he did just that and put paid to the 2014 budget and all the slime that Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey attached to it. This budget has successfully isolated Abbott and his merry band of far right conservatives. It sets out to remove any memory of Abbott’s Government.

It remains to be seen if they will lay down and accept defeat. How Abbott responds in defence of his 2014 worst ever budget will be interesting.

For Turnbull it remains to be seen if this Budget efficaciously recasts him as the moderate he purported to be when he challenged Abbott. But once the populace gains an impression of a government and, once locked on that impression, they don’t want to budge.

I cannot imagine that with only a one seat majority that the Christiansens of this world will not stir the pot in some sort of self-indulgent manner.

How will the average punter see what has been presented? Will they react with disgust at the waste of four years in the life of the nation where Abbott and Turnbull have governed so ineffectively?

A government who told us that only the conservatives knew how to manage money. It was in their DNA, yet they managed to double Labor’s debt. Their naivety, after delivering the 2014 disaster in thinking that a hostile Senate would pass the bulk of the draconian measures that stripped benefits away from the unemployed, slashed education spending and imposed a co-payment for each visit to the doctor was laughable.

At least we can be satisfied that the horrors of that misguided budget have been expunged. The fact, contrary to the thoughts of some political diehards, is that the LNP have been dreadful managers of our money.

Will they just forgive and forget saying that Malcolm has turned around a Government so badly of touch. Yes, he was the man we thought he was. One so smart that he could steal Labor policies and get away with it. Make no mistake, this budget is as much about the remaking of Malcolm as anything else.

Are the punters smart enough to see the political games they have been subjected to during the Coalitions term in office? Their brutal onslaught on Labor when in office. The ”debt and disaster” and ”fiscal emergency” years. The accusations that Labor were a big taxing, high spending party.

With this budget they have morphed themselves into just that by using socialist policies. In my time following politics I don’t think I have ever seen a party so obstinately betray its own ideology and deliver a socialist budget.

Writing for Fairfax Mark Kenny agrees:

”Where Labor offered a guarantee on Medicare, needs-based school funding, curbs on excessive greed in the big banks, and imaginative nation-building infrastructure, it now finds itself up against a government committed more-or-less to these very things.

The comprehensiveness of the Coalition’s ideological retreat marks arguably the largest systematic reversal in recent political history. In area after area, the Turnbull government has adopted its opponent’s arguments.”

Whilst in one way it is enormously complimentary, in another, Labor and Bill Shorten, are hardly in a position to gloat. The rug has been pulled from beneath them.

So what do we make of this budget now that the Government has conceded we have a revenue problem?

It has decided to raise taxes. Make no mistake. This Government has gone down the path of high taxes. The banks have been subjected to a $6.2 billion tax – something Labor has wanted to do for years. The banks can afford it, but the big question is will they pass it on? My guess is that they will.

You could hardly argue against the Medicare levy to fund Labor’s NDIS.

Again they are promising a surplus by 2020-21 funded by the normal mix of optimistic revenue growth and a still higher than average tax-to-GDP ratio.

However, as Adam Creighton points out in The Australian:

”Treasury forecasts in the May 2017 Budget must be taken with a large grain of salt, particularly on the revenue side. It overestimated the amount of revenue it will collect from taxpayers in eight out of the last nine years. Treasury expects tax receipts to increase from $A405.7 billion in 2017 to $A496 billion in 2020, or from 23.2 per cent of GDP to 25 per cent. Its forecasts will have to be highly accurate if its prediction of a Budget surplus of $A7.4 billion in 2021 is to come true.”

Turnbull has successfully isolated Medicare, schools, banks, public investment and housing affordability leaving Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen to argue in degrees. It is a less compelling argument. Maybe they should adopt the “you thieving bastards’’ one. An after effect of Turnbull’s isolationist strategy may result in pushing Labor further to the left.

We have to live within our means Morrison has warned us. Will the anti-debtors of the right in the LNP accept the truckloads delivered in this budget?

Incidentally, what happened to the environment, jobs and growth, equality, real wages, job security, homelessness, poverty?  Is it possible that Malcolm got the nod from Donald that America was going to opt out of the Paris climate agreement and that’s why it didn’t rate a thought. Whatever happened to the once champion of climate change?

On this day last year I wrote this:

A GPs are certainly not happy with the government’s plan to trying to enforce a GP co-payment by stealth by extending the freeze on Medicare rebates for another two years, saving them almost a billion dollars and forcing doctors to put their prices up. Posters are going up in every waiting room in the nation warning patients of the government’s plans. The bastards would privatise the Parliament if they had half the chance.

B How could anyone seriously vote for a party that has performed so pathetically – that has so many unfair policies? Firstly with a leader in Tony Abbott who was nothing more than a grubby uncouth loudmouth gutter politician. Secondly, in the short time he has been in the job Malcolm Turnbull has proven to be the most hypocritical Prime Minister in our history. A party full of obnoxious liars with a ‘right to rule’ attitude. A party that has been in power for three years and on the eve of an election finally tells the country that it has a plan.

C A party that argues it is the one better placed to govern for the next three years when it hasn’t done so for the past three. A party that has wasted three years into which nothing will be recorded by political historians as being worthwhile.

A party who boasts a plan for growth and jobs while there are more people looking for work now than at any time in the past twenty years. A plan three years in the making. Are the people of Australia really going to reward such abysmal governance with another term? Surely not.

A party that thinks climate change is an invention of the left to replace communism.

I had better stop there, my fingers are cramping.

D Why reward a bad government with another three years? It’s tantamount to giving your approval to do the same thing again. You wouldn’t do that to your children.

My thought for the day.

“The young celebrate their youth and the old get their satisfaction by dreaming of the way things once were.”

By Ric Testori

How often do we hear how taxpayers are funding something or other? In most cases, when it´s put like this, we can assume that our money is being wasted on something, like politician’s travel rorts. And we hate our money to be wasted, don´t we! So statements like these can usually be taken as an appeal to our emotions rather than our intellect, and most are probably fact-free.

Apart from the the fact that the target of some government spending may be either good or bad depending on our views and opinions, it is ALWAYS false that it is being paid with taxpayers’ money. In most cases, it´s being paid for with non-taxpayers’ money!

As an example, let’s take the money the federal government is going to give to Adani for it´s enormous coal mine – a billion dollars! Firstly, we are told that this is only a loan, not a gift. But if many experts are correct then that mine is likely to go bust, which means the loan will never be repaid. So it is, actually, a gift. Now here’s the question: Who pays for it?

Both the LNP and ALP are proud of their economic management abilities and encourage us to cheer when they tell us they aim to “balance the budget”. Put simply, they proudly tell us that their spending (expenses) will be limited to their tax revenues (income), just like your household or small business budget. Like you, they will be responsible and stay within their means. We should ask if you would be considered responsible if you failed to pay for your kid’s education or your family’s health requirements, but let’s not go there just now.

So, to balance their budget our government would need to limit expenses by cutting welfare spending to cover the loss of Adani’s billion dollar gift/loan. And now we get to the point – the people who are having their incomes cut, the ones on welfare, are rarely taxpayers. They are the involuntary unemployed workers who don’t have a job because there are not enough jobs to go around. Or part-time workers who’ve just had their penalty rates cut. Or those on the minimum wage who’s real income has fallen but the government firmly refuses to increase that miserly wage. These are the poor bastards who will pay that billion dollars – the non-taxpayers.

So please stop accepting the bullshit that your taxes are paying for something – they aren’t. In fact the only time your taxes are paying for something is when the government’s budget is in surplus. Think about it – they are in surplus because they are taxing you MORE than they are spending. You are being overcharged! And you need to understand that the government has absolutely no need for your taxes to cover their spending because they create the money that you and they spend. The whole balanced budget story is a lie, it is not based on reality.

Here is a video which explains it better than I ever can:

By Ross Hamilton

I first heard about a cashless society back in 1980 when I started work for the Commonwealth Bank. Our manager returned from a conference, informing us that the wheels had started turning to make Australia a cash-free society in as little as ten years. Thirty-seven years later, and a long time after the end of my banking career, it seems we are finally getting very close to that point of cash becoming a thing of the past. But so far, I am not seeing anyone talk too much about the very real negative that can come with this unless a government finally steps up to the plate for real for the first time.

The amount of cash used in the Australian economy will have been on the decrease the last few years with the continuing growth in eftpos including the maturing of the ‘pay-wave’ technology. The more we use those technologies, the less we need cash. But at what cost?

The Reserve Bank is about to introduce innovative technology which will make money transfers happening almost instantaneously, and, so the argument goes, we have less need than ever for the plastic folding stuff. And it can be argued that removing cash from society saves us the cost of producing it.

The pretty bits of plastic we currently use to pay for a steak sanger at the pub for lunch will be replaced by electronic transactions via the banks. And what shall the banks do? Continue racking up more fees for us all to pay. The big four banks in Australia already make literally billions in profit each year. And a massive part of that profit comes from all the fees they charge. The interest on your loans just essentially pays the bills. It is fees that create those obscene profits.

Banks have it down to a fine art – charging for anything and everything. The frequent excuse is that they are just recovering costs. And that is complete garbage. Are we really expected to believe that it costs a bank two-dollars or more to automatically process an electronic ATM withdrawal for a non-customer? Of course it doesn’t! It is a punishment fee for daring to not be that bank’s customer and adding to the pile in their Scrooge McDuck Money Bins.

What is going to happen once cash is removed from our grubby little hands? Everything becomes simply transactions on our credit card or bank account. And what will banks do in response to that? They can be relied on to keep charging fees which reflect the amount of transactions on accounts. Dumping cash in favour of an all-electronic system shall mean a drastic increase in the amount of transactions. And that means a massive bonus in fees for the banks and profit levels that could simply dwarf the current huge profits.

Now we come to the big crunch. Who is going to be paying all those added billions in fees? We are. Every single person in the country stands to have their transaction fees on their bank accounts simply soar. But a five cent, ten cent, one or two dollar fee to someone on current average wages of almost $80,000 pa (latest ABS data) is not as hard as it is to someone on a bit over $20,000 pension. These fees are not equitable according to capacity to pay. Yet the only way of opting out–paying as much in cash as possible–will be replaced by significantly increased costs on those least able to afford them.

This problem is nothing new. But no matter what political flavour our governments are, they all simply let the banks keep on their merry way. The problem is always shoved back into the Too Hard pile to be ignored. And that is before factoring in the massive bonanza coming their way in the cashless society which the RBA say we could be seeing as soon as 2020. In three years time, the low-income earners could be hit with a massive ‘tax’ payable to the banks.

No, Malcolm, the banking CEOs are not trembling with fear at the prospect of the annual visit to a completely pointless and powerless Senate committee. They’re laughing about it over Cuban cigars and Penfold’s Rare Tawny in a private club somewhere, courtesy of their millions in bonuses, all paid for by we poor schlubs. But if the RBA are correct and the cashless society could be on us by 2020, the buck has to stop with the Turnbull government right now. You have to do something meaningful which shall significantly ease the burden on those least able to pay, before it is too late to do anything. How about limiting the amount banks shall financially benefit from the cashless society bonanza? It would be a damned good start.

This article was originally published on Ross’s Rant.