Which ever party promises to bring back Tazos will get my vote.
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TAZOS!
Where did that come from?
Iāve always advocated for the return of Tazos.
Everything has gotten worse since Tazos stopped. Is it coincidence? Yeah, probably. But who cares. Everyone loves Tazos.
You know what they say. Money canāt buy happiness, but it can buy bags of chips which come with Tazos, and that probably doesnāt make you completely happy but it doesnāt make you any sadder and thatās good too.
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Ah those were simpler timesā¦
And better too!
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Insert here Why Not Both gif
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Currently Super Guarantee is 11.5% and next year goes up to 12%
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Wonāt letting people access super to buy a house:
Drive up property prices
Benefit wealthy people who donāt have to draw out their super
I think you can buy property now through a SMSF. You just canāt use itā¦yeah rightā¦you think all those beach houses are not being used by the owners?
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Yeah what I meant itās extra money that needs to be paid to you not less.
But Hambo corrected me. Some people can have the money taken out of their take home pay
The answer to more affordable houses is not giving any more money to people to buy houses.
Itās making more houses and reducing the demand for houses.
Since demand is only flexible for a dwelling for someone owning more than one or the number of people introduced to the market.
So as far as Iām concerned itās simple.
Make houses cheaper to build
- from government use taxation and migration policy
Reduce the number of people looking to buy one. - using taxation and migration policy.
Itās a red herring to suggest itās anything else imho.
Theres already accelerated private pathways to build homes (private certifiers and complying developments that by pass councils).
Its not local government despite what state and federal governments say, Donāt let them point fingers.
It is expensive to hire a tradesmen. I donāt care what anyone says - do a renovation. The biggest component of your bill is labour. Not materials.
So again this can all be solved from Canberra.
Change immigration settings to be pro construction competition.
Change tax laws to make it more expensive to own multiple properties. Tax harder to discourage land banking.
Change tax laws to make it advantageous to owner occupiers.
Change bank lending practices to ration credit.
Start building more public housing and more university accomodation.
You will then get moderated or lower house prices.
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Agree the Age was a left leaning newspaper, like you I read it evey day from 1970 until I stopped having it delivered when the news became available on line as well as on TV and never read it again after 2013. Knowing it was in its death throes, its carcase was sold to Ch9.
Both numbers are wrong.
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As now, it really only benefits those who donāt need it: who have managed to salary sacrifice up to $50,000 over time.
Iām sure the LNP would like to allow compulsory contributions to be extracted (maybe all of them). It would utterly undercut the idea of the system, because apart from the housing prices damage it would result in a large proportion of the population destroying their retirement savings.
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Not surprising. Stand by for some ageism-related rant to ājustifyā his mistake.
Now here is a Liberal policy that we can appreciate !!
Duttonās $20K tax break on lunches
News
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will promise tax offsets for work lunches in his first commitment of the election year, but he faces internal instability after a bruising preselection stoush in a key seat.
Dutton will hold a rally in Brisbane today, after a similar event in Melbourne last week, to demonstrate the Coalitionās attachment to its core small business constituency, promising tax deductions of up to $20,000 for meal and entertainment expenses for companies turning over less than $10 million.
The measure, to run for two years, will apply to dining and entertainment for clients, vendors, and employees, Dutton will say in a speech provided in advance.
Alcohol will be exempt and Fringe Benefits Tax will not apply.
āWe want other small businesses to spend more at their local cafes, clubs and pubs. And if they can take their employees to the venues and pay for a meal as part of a milestone sales event or acknowledgement for their hard work, then it is a win-win for both ā¦ā Dutton is expected to say, vowing the policy will help business ārecover from a horrible period under three years of Laborā.
Dutton, criticised for not revealing new policies in last weekās speech, will be speaking in inner-city Brisbane, where he is keen to reclaim the seats of Brisbane and Ryan from the Greens.
In Brisbaneās suburbs, the Coalition believes it can steal the
seat of Blair from Labor. Labor is hopeful of winning Leichhardt, in Cairns, from the opposition.
But the opposition leader may face an intra-party headache as conservatives lick their wounds following Indigenous advocate Nyunggai Warren Mundineās preselection loss to tech executive Gisele Kapterian in the Sydney seat of Bradfield yesterday.
The contest, in the seat held by retiring Liberal MP Paul Fletcher, pitted the partyās right-wing establishment against former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian and former treasurer Joe Hockey, who supported Kapterian. Former prime minister Tony Abbott was making calls to party members encouraging a vote for Mundine, according to three sources, while deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley backed Kapterian.
Mundineās opponents were worried his candidacy would result in the Liberals losing the seat because his conservative views, and advocacy against the Voice to parliament, may have jarred with voters in the only Liberal seat that voted in favour of the Voice referendum question in 2023.
Mundine said in a widely distributed statement after the vote that he wished the winner all the best. But in comments to this masthead he expressed frustration about reports of ātreacheryā.
āI am very disappointed and Iāll be seeking clarification,ā he said, as his team worked to lobby the party leadership over the result and their discontent.
A senior right faction source
said: āItās war now. The wets, the moderates, have been screwing us around for too long ā¦ People who arenāt solid will be gotten rid of, weāll be going slowly bit by bit.ā
The depth of anger among Mundineās allies threatens to create disunity in branches that will be crucial to Kapterianās fundraising efforts against challenger, independent Nicolette Boele.
At the last election Boele won 20 per cent of the primary vote, cutting Fletcherās margin to 4.5 per cent. A redistribution has cut the Liberalsā margin to an estimated 2.5 per cent.
Itās a terrible policy.
After bleating about cost of living for 3 years they give a 20k tax cut to the wealthy suburban Accountant, Lawyer, Doctor and Real Estate agent so they can shout each other a trip to Flower Drum or Rockpool.
The liberals allways say they want to pivot to working class, but there first policy is huge tax break for the bosses.
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Albaneseās inaction drives his own party towards extinction
Extinctions sometimes strangely entwine ā like the ancient Maugean skate ray, of which it is estimated fewer than 120 remain and which will likely be driven to extinction in the next few years because of the Tasmanian salmon industry, and the federal ALP, of which 78 lower house members remain.
Maugean skates need oxygen to survive and breed. Untreated sewage flowing from salmon feedlots into Tasmaniaās remote Macquarie Harbour equals that of a city of a million people. All that ā ā ā ā eats so much oxygen that large areas become marine death zones. The ALP is similarly suffocating in a deluge of corporate ā ā ā ā that eats the values and purpose it needs to survive.
And yet, under Anthony Albanese, Labor gives the ever stronger impression that it has never seen a corporation that it wonāt prostrate itself to. Each knee-step taken in his bizarre pilgrimage of national humiliation, from his log cabin origins to his house on the hill, is loudly tolled by the sound of the corporate cash registers jubilantly ringing with growing profits. Qantas and the promised legislation to make it pay customers compensation for late or cancelled flights? No action ā ka-ching! The gambling industry and the ads more than 70 per cent of Australians want gone? No action ā ka-ching! More coal mine approvals, new gas fields approvals, $1 billion for a Gina Rinehart-backed mine? No problem! Ka-ching! Even a spineless environmental measure like Tanya Plibersekās ānature positiveā bill is axed by Albanese at the behest of the West Australian mining industry. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
The word extinction was first paired with species in the 1880s as a result of a Cambridge donās search for the last great auk, a penguin-like bird hunted to extinction by humans. āA healthy population existed until close to the time of the speciesā extinction,ā Tim Flannery wrote in a recent piece in New York Review of Books. āWhen it came, however, the decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.ā While āthe great auk was difficult to hunt at seaā, Flannery continued, āwhen it came ashore to breed it was uniquely vulnerable.ā
And so too Albo. His much-remarked gifts of backroom dealing and party wrangling that worked in the darkness of factional intrigue serve him less well on the naked, exposed rock of government. In 2022, Labor secured just 32.58 per cent of the national primary vote, its lowest vote since 1934. Laborās electoral fortunes give every appearance of spiralling only further downwards at the next election, with the party falling, according to the latest poll, to 31 per cent.
Great auks were not difficult to tame. There was one in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, perhaps a little lost, like Albo at the Murdochsā recent Christmas bash. A Danish savant kept another on a leash, not unlike the salmon barons who seem to have Albo on speed dial, with the prime minister seemingly ever ready to fly to Tasmania solely to endorse salmon companies with a record of environmental destruction, one so bad their actions led to the banning of salmon farming in Washington state (Cooke Aquaculture, owners of Tassal). According to Hilary Franz, the state commissioner of public lands there, āCookeās disregard ā¦ recklessly put our stateās aquatic ecosystem at risk.ā
Then there are the owners of Huon Aquaculture, JBS, a global byword for criminality. In 2017, its owner brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista admitted to bribing over 1800 politicians and public officials in Brazil. Corruption was, according to an interview Joesley gave in 2017 before going to jail with Wesley, āthe rule of the game. And whatās most important, corruption was on the upper floors, with the authorities.ā Today Wesleyās son Henry Batista, described in The Australian Financial Review as āthe Kendall Roy of salmonā, works in Hobart as CEO of Huon Aquaculture. (Henry was not implicated in the senior Batistasā corruption.)
According to the Australia Institute, the three 100 per cent foreign-owned Tasmanian salmon companies have paid no corporate tax for the past five years. For Albo ā who has extraordinarily floated plans to exempt Macquarie Harbour from all federal environmental law under a national-interest provision typically reserved for emergencies ā thatās seemingly more reason to ensure the rule of law doesnāt apply to the salmon mafia.
And once one industry can exist outside the law, why not others? Why not Woodside, which plans to keep its gas fields pumping until 2070 and open new ones, making a mockery of net zero by 2050? Why not Hancock Prospecting? And while at it, criminalise those who protest such things as the fossil fuel industryās responsibility for the climate crisis.
If you talk to extinction experts, they will point out that a sighting of a large flock of birds can mean little as to their future prospects. A flock of, say, 78 birds may give a misleading view of the birdsā prospects as a species, when perhaps only 16 of the birds are capable of reproducing. With Laborās primary vote steadily collapsing, Albo may be remembered not as a nickname, but as a byword for a mass extinction event.
The ordinary person who has lived through the extraordinary, frequently heavy-handed state interventions of recent years with COVID, knows exactly just how powerful the state is. So too does Peter Dutton, a former Queensland walloper who in other circumstances might be thought to have the electoral appeal of a venomous axolotl. What the new right gets right though is that people are angry, that life gets harder, and people want change. People want the state to act ā for the people.
What the right offers them is its newly found intent to use the state to achieve change. From Weimar Germany on, the cry of state action, no matter how mindless and destructive, has always appealed to societies where the established polity has grown incapable of acting. Duttonās call for nuclear reactors built by the state may be a shroud to help the fossil fuel industry continue to profit. But at a deeper level it appeals as Donald Trumpās equally spurious calls for a wall appealed ā it speaks of politicians willing to use the state to address problems. If hypocritical posturing, it nevertheless suggests a will to action.
Yet for Labor, still mired in its 1990s romance with the Hawke-Keating legacy, it too often is the market and only the market that has power. The best the state can do is kneel before it. And if Qantas or Tabcorp or News or Woodside or Tassal donāt wish to alter their ways, Labor simply agrees, rewarding and further enabling them.
The problem is that what is at stake is much greater than the Labor Party, but democracy itself. A society that no longer can use the state to address its problems ā from the environment to housing to rapidly escalating inequality to the increasingly unfettered power of corporations ā looks more and more like the US, where Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for allegedly murdering a health insurance company CEO. Historically, assassinations only become celebrated as political protest when political systems have grown sclerotic and violent change is often imminent ā from Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 to the Romanovs in 1917 to the Rwandan dictator Habyarimana in 1994.
Delay, deny, defend: a version of the words found on Mangioneās shell casings refers to the immoral practices used by American insurance corporations in refusing to honour legitimate health claims. But they also can sound uncomfortably close to the strategy and rhetoric of the Albanese government in regard to so much of its failure to act on the many problems besetting our country.
For democracy does not die in darkness. It grows terminally ill in the Chairmanās Lounge. What Labor gets wrong is thinking that people respect it for grovelling to greed. For being photographed with Alan Joyce or in proximity of a Murdoch. For backing the Batistas. They donāt. They are enraged. Laborās diminishing flock of lesser auks will be hunted down by the corporate raiders feasting on all the plumage and flesh that the state can offer in perks, breaks, subsidies, exemptions ā what are, incidentally, our taxes, our heritage, our way of life ā until all that is left is a bare, ever hotter rock and beneath it a dark seething sea covered in salmon feedlots, ā ā ā ā -flecked foam devoid of life.
Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In 2024 won the Baillie Gifford Prize (for non-fiction) for his most recent book, Question 7. He is the first writer to win both prizes.
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Under 10 million annual, come on mate, this is for the battlers! āMilestone occasionsā. Seriously, back of a coaster politics, will be reported as a small business boosting initiative.
Wonāt these small companies just claim everything?
I doubt the boss is taking the apprentice to lunch after buying his first ford ranger.
Most likely hes taking his wife out to dinner and claiming it as an expense.
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Lol not really.
Iām just talking about it being more not less money for working people.
Which for most it is(I thought all)
Thatās the conversation I was having with Hambo and he corrected me.
The super access to support first home buying is a policy that is highly political on party lines and its merits contested by industry figures with divergent views. Whether itās a sound policy is dependent on oneās views of long term property price growth in many ways. History suggests home prices over the medium to long term will almost certainly appreciate, probably at a faster rate than historical growth in the average super balanceā¦ On this basis, based on history, Iād suggest allowing first home buyers to access super to buy their first home is sound and low risk.
Thereās a reasonably strong environment to support the continuation of medium to long term house capital growth nationally. Whilst sharemarkets will continue to move through cycles with major corrections sometimes bringing values down 20-30%, rarely does the property market āsinkā like the share market does possibly 1-2 times over a 25 year window. Hence I think itās possibly a lower risk, sound growth story to allow super access to buy a home.