Australia’s exemption from US steel & aluminium tariffs will be about a beneficial as exempting Pitt Street Mall from hot weather when Sydney is 40 degrees. Largely meaningless lip service. If global trade is dislocated, it will hurt Australia. HARD.— Stephen Koukoulas (@TheKouk) March 10, 2018
Saturday 17 March 2018
Tweet of the Week
Labels:
Australia-US relations,
trade
Friday 16 March 2018
What a farce is the Dept of Home Affairs under Peter Dutton
In early July 2017 it was reported that Roman Quaedvlieg the head of the federal government's Australian Border Force had taken indefinite leave on full-pay since May following an external investigation by the Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity.
Despite a rather sordid tale coming to light coyly wrapped in phrases like 'inappropriate behaviour relating to a personal relationship' Mr. Quaedvlieg refused to resign and the Prime Minister continued to sit on the results of two reviews of the investigation and his conduct in office.
To date Roman Quaedvlieg has been paid in excess of $500,000 while on leave.
It wasn't until details of the PM&C review were leaked to the media and Prime Minister Turnbull and Minister for Home Affairs Dutton felt a need to sweep the decks clean ahead of the forthcoming federal election that the Governor-General was finally requested to sack Quaedvlieg and the announcement was released on 16 March 2018.
[Australian Border Force Act 2015—Subsection 21(4)—Statement of Grounds of Termination of Appointment as Australian Border Force Commissioner]
According to ABC News on 16 March 2018; His sacking ends a drawn-out and expensive internal investigation that will trigger a restructure in Peter Dutton's new super-ministry, Home Affairs. Mr Quaedvlieg was a former chief police officer in the ACT and the inaugural Border Force Commissioner.
Labels:
Border Farce,
corruption,
Dept of Home Affairs,
investigation
With a royal commission having found that all major religions house and protect paedophiles we still find Liberal Party MPs seeking to extend the influence of priests & ministers in the Australian school system in 2018
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
9 March 2018:
Dozens of federal
Liberal MPs have reportedly signed a petition calling for a 25 per cent funding
increase for the controversial National Schools Chaplaincy Program.
Whether the
budget can afford the funding increase or whether the money would be better spent
elsewhere are interesting issues. The bigger legal issue is that the way the
chaplains program operates is illegal…….
The High Court has
struck down the chaplains program as illegal twice already. In 2012, the High
Court ruled the program illegal because the federal government was paying for
the chaplains program without any legislation authorising the spending. To
overcome the High Court decision, federal Parliament quickly passed legislation
to authorise the spending.
The chaplains program
again was struck down again in 2014. Federal Parliament can only pass
legislation dealing with certain subject matters. The High Court ruled that
school chaplains do not fall within any of those.
To get around its own
lack of power to run the chaplains program, the federal government now grants
money to the states for them to run it. Lots of federal government programs
operate this way with the states running programs on behalf of the federal
government using federal money.
Getting a job as a
chaplain requires a person to be recognised as qualified for the role
"through formal ordination, commissioning, recognised religious
qualifications or endorsement by a recognised or accepted religious
institution". In other words, a person has to be religious and endorsed by
a religious group in order to get a job as a chaplain. Atheists need not apply.
Individual schools pick
which religion they want their chaplain to be a member of and then recruit a
person from that religion for the job.
But it makes no
practical sense to require a chaplain to have a particular religion. Chaplains
are strictly prohibited from religious proselytising, although there are
sometimes reports of chaplains breaking the rules. The High Court even
commented that despite the religious sounding job title, the actual work
chaplains do has nothing much to do with religion. Justice Dyson Heydon wrote
that the work of chaplains "could have been done by persons who met a
religious test. It could equally have been done by persons who did not".
In other words, there is
no genuine occupational requirement for a chaplain to be a member of any
particular religion or to be religious at all. The federal government has
simply decided that it wants all chaplains to be religious.
Requiring a chaplain to
be a member of a particular religion is inconsistent with the nature of public
schools……
Requiring a chaplain to
be a member of a particular religion is also illegal. Each state has
anti-discrimination or equal opportunity legislation making it illegal to
discriminate against a person on the ground of religion in employment
decisions. These anti-discrimination rules apply to public schools and their
hiring decisions.
Public schools cannot
advertise a teacher’s job and require that only Hindus are eligible to apply.
Public schools cannot advertise a cleaner’s job and require that only Baptists
are eligible to apply. The reason is because that would be discrimination on
the ground of religion in employment.
It’s exactly the same
with chaplains. Requiring a chaplain to be a member of a particular religion is
religious discrimination and completely illegal for public schools…..
The state
anti-discrimination commissions should do something about public schools
breaching religious discrimination laws. If they don’t, someone will eventually
go to court and the school chaplains program will probably be ruled illegal for
the third, and hopefully final, time.
Thursday 15 March 2018
Let's talk about excess franking credits and why they have been money for jam for the last 17 years
This is what
the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) states about imputation:
Dividends paid to
shareholders by Australian resident companies are taxed under a system known as
imputation. This is where the tax the company pays is imputed, or attributed,
to the shareholders. The tax paid by the company is allocated to shareholders
as franking credits attached to the dividends they receive.
If you receive franking
credits on your dividends, you need to let us know your:
* franked amount
* franking credit.
If you are an Australian
resident, we will use this information to:
* reduce your tax
liability from all forms of income (not just dividends) and from your taxable
net capital gain
* refund any excess
franking to you after any of your income tax and Medicare levy liabilities have
been met.
You are eligible for a
refund of excess franking credits if all of the following apply:
* You receive franked
dividends, on or after 1 July 2000, either directly or through a
trust or partnership.
* Your basic tax liability
is less than your franking credits after taking into account any other tax
offsets you are entitled to.
* You meet our
anti-avoidance rules, which are designed to ensure everyone pays their fair
share of tax.
If you have received a
dividend that has Australian franking credits attached from a New Zealand
franking company, you may be eligible to claim the Australian sourced franking
credits.
The policy of
giving cash back for unused franking credits was introduced in 2000 by then
Howard Government treasurer Peter
Costello and for the last 17 years it has been systematically rorted by superannuation
funds, private corporations, trusts and individuals - to the point where Treasury
pays out an est. $6 billion per annum under this scheme.
With one individual whopaid no income tax reportedly received millions claiming cash for unused franking credits and the average unused credits cash back payment for people in the top 1% of self-managed super funds being est. $83,000 a year.
With one individual whopaid no income tax reportedly received millions claiming cash for unused franking credits and the average unused credits cash back payment for people in the top 1% of self-managed super funds being est. $83,000 a year.
In March 2018
Federal Labor announced a policy effective
January 2019 which removes claims for franking credits
- but only in those years that the prospective claimant has no income tax
liability payable.
So ending
taxpayer-subsidised money for jam for around est. 9 per cent of the population who were receiving cash refunds for tax they had never paid .
Turnbull,
Morrison & Co then came out fighting – accusing Opposition Leader Bill Shorten of robbing low income self-funded retirees
and aged pensioners.
At that
point, somewhat predictably, embarrassment for the Turnbull Government began…..
What Treasurer and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison considered low income retirees was elucidated.
Turnbull & Co were accused of telling political lies.
What Treasurer and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison considered low income retirees was elucidated.
The Australian, 14 March 2018:
A retired couple living
in a $2m house, with $3.2m in super, are classified as ‘‘low income’’. They
have no income tax liability. They could also have an investment property and
still wouldn’t have a tax liability because of the bizarre “senior and pensioners’
tax offset”, which lifts their effective tax-free threshold to about $58,000.
Turnbull & Co were accused of telling political lies.
The
Guardian, 14
March 2018:
You won’t have missed
the foghorn blast from the Turnbull government and its media amplifiers that
has accompanied Labor’s latest
bold foray on tax policy.
Scott Morrison has
declared Labor is stealing
tax refunds from pensioners and low-income retirees, and Malcolm
Turnbull says Bill Shorten “is going after the savings of your parents and
their friends and their contemporaries”.
So how do these
terrifying-sounding claims stack up?
Let’s bring in the
respected economist Saul Eslake, who has no political dog in this race. Eslake
is blunt. He says the government’s posturing is “misleading in the same way
that most of what Scott Morrison said
about Labor’s policy on negative gearing was misleading”.
To understand precisely
what is misleading – the first thing to know is when we are talking about
Australian retirees having low incomes, often what that means is people have
low taxable incomes.
Income from
superannuation funds is tax free once people turn 60. Eslake says the decision
to make income from super tax free is “top of my list of the dumbest tax policy
decisions of the last 25 years”.
It means people with
substantial assets, and big super balances – millionaires in fact – are in a
position to report low taxable income, and in fact structure their affairs to
ensure they have low taxable income.
They were also quite rightly accused of knowing that dividend imputation à la Costello is an expensive rort.
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
13 March 2018:
Treasury considered
dividend imputation reform in the lead up to Treasurer Scott Morrison's last
budget, creating a dossier entitled "Tax Policy - Dividend
Imputation" more than a year before Labor announced it would target the
tax refunds of more than one million Australians on Tuesday.
The confidential file
itemised in a list required to be disclosed by departments as part of freedom
of information requirements was opened by Treasury in the first-half of last
year.
Fairfax Media
understands Treasury has been examining withholding dividend cheques from
non-taxpaying shareholders ahead of this year's May budget.
Investigating potential
savings needed to fund budget initiatives such as personal income tax cuts is
normal practice in the pre-budget period.
Mr Morrison said on
Tuesday the "government has never entertained" changes to the way it
gives cash back to shareholders in response to a policy he described as a
"cruel blow for retirees and pensioners," but his predecessor
Joe Hockey first asked how dividend imputation could be improved - not replaced
- three
years ago.
A white discussion paper
on tax reform commissioned by Mr Hockey and completed by Treasury in 2015
found "there are some revenue concerns with the refundability of
imputation credits," indicating the department was receiving lower tax
revenues than it expected.
"It provides a
greater incentive for shareholders of closely held companies to delay
distributions until a time when individual owners are subject to a relatively
low tax rate, to receive a refund of tax paid by the company."
The
list published by Treasury shows the department's work on dividend
imputation policy continued after Mr Morrison became Treasurer in 2016…..
Labor, which has not
released Parliamentary Budget Office costings of its policy, said it planned on
cancelling an average cash refund of $5000 on share dividends from 8 per cent
of taxpayers, including 200,000 voters who self-manage their own super funds
and 1 per cent of full pensioners..….
"Rethink: Better tax, better Australia" discussion paper information here and submissions here.
Image found on Twitter
"Rethink: Better tax, better Australia" discussion paper information here and submissions here.
Labels:
rorts,
shares,
taxation,
Turnbull Government
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