On Thu, 15 May 2014, Peter Ross wrote:

From: "Tim Connors" <tconnors@rather.puzzling.org>

...

On Thu, 15 May 2014, Peter Ross wrote:

...

Dear Terry, .. Could you do us a favour and proofread before sending stuff off to ministers.

Point taken. I saw some errors as well.

I did it online and I was writing the last paragraph when I reached the maximum numbers of characters so I had to go back and forth to streamline it. I was more busy with that.

...

If they can't understand you, they will just bin your opinion.

Well, I hope the message came across.

To be calm is difficult in this climate. Just think of the $400 sacrifice of a $200 000 earner while someone under 30 has to wait half a year to get any money when unlucky enough not to have or to lose his job.

It's a frontal assault on the social welfare net "balanced" with a few bucks less for well-off people.

That's passing a "fair share" test for the ruling class here..

http://australianpolitics.com/2014/05/13/hockey-federal-budget-speech.html

"As Australians, we must not leave our children worse off. That’s not fair. That is not our way."

That was Hockey in his budget speech. Straight from Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

(Little reminder: The unemployed under 30 are someone's children..)

And people vote for this bullfish.. and, when I look at The Herald Sun, that's the brainwash the majority of people get as their daily medicine.

Regards Peter

Here's my version. In the spirit of open sauce, I hereby declare my letter GFDL. Feel free to adapt to your own purposes :) Josh Frydenberg, Since negative gearing applies to pre-existing properties and not just to newly built houses, 90% of the money lost due to negative gearing goes only to boosting demand and not supply, and so just goes into interfering with the normal operation of the housing market to cause prices to rise artificially. This is a very inefficient waste of taxpayers money, redistributing from the poor (taxpayers who don't own investment housing and can't afford to own their own homes) to the already-rich (people with their own home plus additional investment homes), and the $5B annually lost from this could have better been recovered to fix the budget non-emergency, than ripping out $8B annually from schools. Why was negative gearing not addressed in the budget? The treasurer once advocated family and discretionary trusts be taxed as companies. Why hasn't the budget addressed the large amount of foregone revenue from this tax minimisation strategy instead of, for example, requiring the most disadvantaged members of our society to have to live out of the gutter for the first 6 months of their unemployment? Why has the budget given a subsidy to businesses to employ over 50 year olds, where without actually addressing the root cause of underemployment, this will just end up resulting in the redistribution of jobs from an already underemployed sector of the community (under 30 year olds) to those above 50? Can the Coalition please consider stopping interfering with markets when they're not actually addressing the root cause of underlying problems with them? Why, despite there being a supposed budget emergency, has the Coalition decided to forgo revenue from a mining tax and a carbon tax? Could that not have been used instead of requiring students to pay 3% extra interest on their HECS loans (something the architect of the HECS scheme, Bruce Chapman, describes as grossly unfair on poor students. I know the Liberals don't care about poor people, but the rest of us do). What does the Coalition propose we get our future income from once all of our natural resources have been plundered by Tony's mates in the IPA? Why, despite there being a problem with enforcement of existing taxation rules, has the Coalition decided that each of Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers can be able to self audit each others tax avoidance work and pass it all off as "all OK, Jack" (we know how well that worked for Arthur Andersen and Enron)? Why has no effort been made into closing the rort used and recovering the tax that ought to be paid by the 75 people who had an income over $1M but who had found $195 million dollars of deductions, including $65 million for the cost of managing their tax affairs? ("Budget pain? Not for millionaires who pay no tax", fairfax, May 13) Why has federal money been paid for local roads improvements works (and inefficient ones like the Melbourne East West freeway, where there is no rational economic case to be made, and which will cause no improvement on the roads network in the medium to long-term), but Tony has declared that rail projects are not a federal issue, despite the entire Melbourne rail network already running at full capacity? Why, despite the Coalition constantly trumpeting how much better the market is at being efficient than a government, has the Coalition decided that they need to stop the impending implementation of carbon markets, and instead let the government pick winners and losers with an inefficient and more expensive direct action plan, subsidising companies that are already polluting? Thankyou, I look forward to your answers. -- Tim Connors