This is part of what Australian Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott and Deputy Prime
Minister-elect Warren Truss promised
to enact, once they formed federal government along with those Liberal and
National Party members elected to Parliament on 7 September 2013:
■ Lower the tax-free threshold from $18,200 to $6,000. This will increase
taxes for an est. 6 million Australians earning less than $80,000 per annum and
see many retirees and low income earners having to pay tax.
■
Abolish the low-income superannuation contribution. This will see the reinstatement of 15 per cent tax on superannuation contributions for people earning less than $37,000 per annum and result in an est. 3.6 million workers who earn less than $37,000 paying over $4 billion extra in tax on their superannuation
over the next four years.
■ Introduce a paid parental leave scheme that
replaces a mother's salary up to $75,000 for six months leave, paying for much of this $5.5 billion
scheme with an est. $4.8 billion of tax revenue garnered primarily from the
incomes of ordinary workers rather than with employer or industry contributions.
■ Remove franking credits associated
with the 1.5% paid parental scheme levy on business earnings of $5 million or
more. Resulting in shareholders with lower tax
thresholds or superannuants on tax concessions missing out on tax refunds.
■ Abolish the means-tested Schoolkids Bonus received by an est.1.3 million families providing up to $410 for each primary school child and up to $820 for each high school child.
■ Abolish the means-tested Schoolkids Bonus received by an est.1.3 million families providing up to $410 for each primary school child and up to $820 for each high school child.
■ Abolish the means-tested Lower Income Support
Bonus for low income households, including those in low paying/part time
employment, independent retirees, old age pensioners, war widows, and single
parents.
■ Introduce a $2 billion Direct Action Plan which is predicted to fail to meet the 5 per cent greenhouse gas emissions target due to significant underfunding and, therefore will waste the tax revenue assigned to this plan.
■ Cut 12,000 public service jobs across the
country, which is likely to result in a decrease in service delivery to regional communities.
■ Require major mobile phone carriers and regional
communities to stump up over $100 million to build the towers to eliminate
blackspots. Which will almost inevitably result in higher phone charges for the average
consumer.
■ Alter the National Broadband Network rollout so that Internet users have to pay to have fibre optic cable connected to their home or business before they can access the markedly reduced download/upload speeds now on offer under this new plan.
■ Cutting $42 million from legal aid services.
■ No new federal funding for the Pacific Highway Upgrade until after the next federal election in 2016 and, Australia-wide the cancellation of one bridge and five rail projects.
■ Alter the National Broadband Network rollout so that Internet users have to pay to have fibre optic cable connected to their home or business before they can access the markedly reduced download/upload speeds now on offer under this new plan.
■ Cutting $42 million from legal aid services.
■ No new federal funding for the Pacific Highway Upgrade until after the next federal election in 2016 and, Australia-wide the cancellation of one bridge and five rail projects.
I ask all those reading this post, who voted for a Liberal or
Nationals candidate, to take a short drive around your neighbourhood and wander
about your shopping centre. Most of the people you see will be affected to
some degree by these plans of Messrs. Abbott and Truss.
So don’t be surprised if in six months time (when these
measures start to affect weekly budgets) you are told the following to your face:
**Please start video now**
* All figures derived from the Federal Coalition's Costings Table, Liberal Party campaign statements, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's victory speech of 7 September 2013, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Dept of Human Services, Centrelink, Financial Standard Online, Business Spectator, Crikey, The Northern Star and The Sydney Morning Herald.
1 comment:
1975 Remember this?
It was revealed in the press that the CIA had offered the Australian opposition Liberal Party (the Liberals were actually conservative) "unlimited funds" in their unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Labor party in the May 1974 parliamentary elections. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti confirmed that the CIA had funded both of the major opposition parties and that the Liberals had been receiving CIA funds since the late 1960s.
According to the former Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA, Dr Ray Cline, the CIA passed information to opposition politicians not only to discredit the Whitlam Government but also to put pressure on Australian civil servants who in turn would pressure the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.
At the same time as U.S. intelligence was targeting the Australian Labor Government, Peter Wright (of Spycatcher infamy. See Malcolm Turnbull) and his colleagues in British intelligence were busy destabilising the British Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Wright conspired with his close friend, James Jesus Angleton, the extreme right-wing head of CIA counter-intelligence, to "target" the three Western leaders they regarded as "Communist agents": Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt in Germany and Gough Whitlam.
Former CIA officers who were among the Agency's "top seven" in 1975, revealed ten years later that "Whitlam was set up. The action that Kerr took was so extreme that it would take far more than a constitutional crisis to cause him to do what he did...." A Deputy Director of the CIA said, "Kerr did what he was told to do."
During the first week of the coup, the Australian army was recalled to barracks and there were reports that units were issued with live ammunition. There were demonstrations against the sacking of the Labor Government throughout Australia; the unions began to mobilise and prepare for a general strike. However, Bob Hawke, the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), summoned the press and delivered a stirring speech in which he said that "working people must not be provoked... we have to show we are not going to allow this to snowball." Hawke's intervention was critical: Australia's organised labour was strangely quiet in response to the affair.
In fact Marshall Green later said that he found Bob Hawke so amenable to the CIA's cause that "Bob gave me his private telephone number and said if anything ever comes up that desperately needs some action, this is the number to ring."
An election was called for December 13th 1975. During the campaign, three letter bombs were posted to Kerr, Fraser and the ultra-right-wing Queensland Premier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.
Most of the press, led by Rupert Murdoch's papers, concluded that the bombs were sent by left-wing extremists within the Labor Party. There was not a shred of evidence to support this and no culprits were ever found, but the charge of "terrorism" was used to great effect against Labor.
Four days before the election, Bjelke-Petersen called a special session of the Queensland Parliament to hear "dramatic revelations". He claimed to be "in possession of material which made clear that two Ministers of the Whitlam Government were due to receive staggering sums of money as a consequence of secret commissions and kickbacks." Bjelke-Petersen then moved quickly to gag any debate and to prevent the Labor leader from arranging for parliamentary investigation of the "revelations". The undisclosed "revelations" made large headlines in the press. No material or evidence of any kind was ever produced, but the publicity achieved its goal. Whitlam lost the election.
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