They way the Pharmacy Guild presented their case was pretty disgusting. I would have had a lot of sympathy about the issue of reducing income for pharmacies, and supported changes to make sure there are equitable outcomes for them. But the whole thing about shortages etc. and just trying to block any change was just rotten. They could have focused on making it a win/win situation - asking for an increase to their payments to make sure they are not losing money would be fair, and the changes would give more time to both customers and pharmacists. Instead of stressing about not forcing people in to their stores frequently so they can upsell them on the other dodgy shit they sell they could have focused on using that extra time to improve health outcomes, which they are constantly saying they are so vital for. If they want to keep their special privileges they get as medical professionals they should act like medical professionals and not shop owners who dispense medicine as a sideline.

You are in the process of putting a diagonal line through the centre of our flag. That feels pretty disrespectful to me. No one was touching your rainbow until you started to extend it to cross out the flag.

Induction stoves are great to cook with, I’d say they are better than gas for almost everything. Probably a wok is the only one most people will have an issue with, and having been stuck with an old electric coil stove in the past and managing to make decent stir-frys I really don’t think that moving to a flat bottomed wok on an induction stove should be a deal breaker.

I’m guessing it was a technique they perfected nagging their parents for lollies and they have just never learned any better ways of engaging with society.

Reducing how much is used in the first place should always have been the priority. But businesses hate the idea of any message to use less of something. So they lobby for things like recycling to be pushed instead, because that both focuses the attention on the behaviour of individuals instead of them, and allows them to keep selling more. And people in general seem to be more than happy to believe that recycling magically fixes the waste problem so that they can keep buying their convenient single use products and not have to do arduous things like remember their own shopping bags.

Didn’t the whole proposal start with a hypothetical 80 year old pensioner? You think she’s going to live to 130, and her million dollar house is going to suddenly stop appreciating in value, so her poor put upon 100 year old kids will only inherit $500k?

Obviously it is far better to scrap any sort of tax on property than burden the poor kids with a reduced inheritance. Far better to make the poor kids (and grandkids, and everyone else’s kids, including those who won’t get an inheritance at all) cough up now with something like the income tax levy that has been proposed.

I don’t see inheritance as a right, and I definitely don’t think the kids having a small amount of tax owing on the house they inherit as “penalisation”.

Any tax change will involve some changes in who and how much people pay and needs to be handled carefully, but protecting inheritances should come far below paying for services: things like hospitals, schools and nursing homes. The next gereration will hurt a lot more from proposals like an income tax levy, and that will also hurt those who are not priveleged enough to inherit a house.

I’m not qualified to produce a solution either, but I think changes to taxation in some form are inevitable. One of the big issues with taxation is who gets the money. Income tax and GST is collected by the Federal governement, who portion out some of it to the States. If the States need/want more money they need to rely on things like stamp duty, land tax, and fees, charges & fines. So even when it would be logical to make coordinated changes to income and weath taxes it is not really politically feasible.

My understanding is that, like with income tax, a tiered rate instead of a flat rate would be fairest. So if you put a low (or no) tax on properties under the average price you would only be taxing those with a large amount of accumulated wealth. Combine that with a deferred payment option (think HECS for houses, with the loan secured by the house) and I think you would have a fair system.

When you combine tiered taxes with a flat rate benefits system you get the fairest outcome - and you cut a lot of red tape. Which is a major benefit of a universal basic income. Strip out the means testing all together - give everyone basic income support, a pension once they reach a set age, pay for education, childcare etc. If you are a multi billionaire you are still going to be paying way more in tax than you receive in the pension, if your education leads you to have a higher income you will be paying it back through your increased tax, we don’t need HECS. And if you remove all of that time and money that goes into Centrelink compliance bullshit we could probably give everyone a four day working week without noticing the slightest difference in productivity.

So what is your argument here, that people who got asset rich through no effort of their own should have that wealth protected so their kids can inherit as much as possible? Is it ok to tax someone if they worked hard to earn the money to buy a $1 million dollar home today, but if you got lucky in the past you should be tax exempt? Tying up your assets in your home already has some major tax benefits - it is exempt from capital gains tax, and barely counts towards the age pension.

Yes there need to be corresponding changes to allow for things like putting off the tax until the home is sold, but I don’t think we should rule out changes to the tax system because your hypothetical home owner didn’t intend to earn 970,000 profit when they bought their home. Perhaps we could also make a change so that this hypothetical pensioner could sell their quarter acre block and move into somewhere smaller that they can more easily maintain, freeing up some of that money so they can actually spend it, without losing most/all of their pension because the same wealth is now “liquid wealth”.

That’s exacty what I’m arguing. A land tax which is able to be put off until the sale where people have low incomes. That would not penalise anyone, it just means some of the windfall gains from rising property prices go towards paying taxes rather than being a freebie to be passed on to the next generation as inheretance.

Why does being a house they live in mean it is not also an asset? If someone prefers to rent and save up more money towards their retirement instead of buying a house why should they be penalised? If someone wants to buy an inner city appartment that is worth less and have more money put aside to pay the body corporate fees why should they get less pension than if they have a freestanding house? If someone wants to sell their house, put that money aside while they travel in a van around Australia for a few years and then buy something suitable when it is time to settle down again, why should they lose their pension compared to someone who leaves the house mostly empty while they travel so it doesn’t count as an asset?

We definitely should have some consideration for the fact that this is someone’s house and they shouldn’t lose it because of unrealised capital gains, but we also shouldn’t be creating a two-tier system which also ties people in to keeping a house which may not be suitable for them any more.

I think options to defer payment until sale of the house for people with low incomes would be worthwhile, but considering the massive benefit we give to pensioners who own their own home I don’t think it is unreasonable for some of that to be repaid from the sale of the house. If that same pensioner held a similar value of assets in any other form we would expect them to be fully self-funded and they would not see a cent of pension.

There is a small dot in North Queensland that only has about 70% chance, what are they doing differently there?

It would actually work better for most investors to have something that worked like this, but which pooled resources to buy multiple homes instead of one owner for a whole house. A single house is not great as your only/main investment - it can’t be sold quickly and you can only sell the whole lot, so if you need to sell at a bad time you lose, and you can’t easily free up a part of your capital. Either a housing investment fund you can buy shares in, or buying shares of a single house (like people do with racehorses) would be a better investment choice for most people.

Then you would be warmer than most homes here. On average the homes they studied were over 18 degrees (64.4 F) for less than 5 hours a day (or closer to 2 hours in Tasmania) and dropped down to minimums of 7.4 (45 F).

They are also built with the expectation that heating is cheap - just whack in a gas ducted heating unit and run it 24/7 over winter! For a long time it was cheaper to use more energy to heat the house than to pay for the materials to make it more efficient.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. I don’t know who individually ends up with responsibility for what happened, but it was some variation of theft, fraud and/or obtaining financial advantage by deception. They made up debts that did not exist, then made people pay them (or in some cases I believe took the money directly from their accounts). If some loan shark rocked up at your door falsely claiming you owed them thousands of dollars and threatening to kneecap you if you didn’t pay up I don’t think anyone would have trouble seeing it as a criminal act, and what the government did was pretty much the same thing.

Hopefully it actually happens. This whole thing was a disgusting misuse of government power against vulnerable individuals. It’s the type of thing you would expect from the Mafia, the fact that it was our govenment is shameful.

You can access your Super from 60. Full access if you retire, or as a Transition to Retirement plan if you are still working.

The age to get the Aged Pension is not the same thing as the retirement age. Our pension works as more of a safety net and top-up to Super, in France it is paid from the salary and expected to be the main income. We can access our Super from 60, and as the amount of time it has been compulsory (and the amount put in by employers) increases the age at which the pension is available becomes less relevant.