Christopher Pyne suggesting that at least students aren't yet being pressed to sell their organs to pay for their university courses. Jaw-droppingly contemptible, coming from a university graduate who cruised through in the golden days of the pre-HECS era. That's right folks, Pyne got his degree free of charge, which is why he's up for screwing the current generation to the floor as a measure of how greatly he values his own university education. For my money he owes considerably more than a kidney.
Mathias Cormann pops up to say that if the government can't whittle down services then we'll just have to pay higher taxes. That's fine by me: we get what we pay for. By that measure the National/Liberal government is costing far too much for the ride we've had so far. Time for another election so we can install a new administration that can offer better value for our progressive tax dollar.
Having said that, neither of the ALPs has seen fit to have a meaningful go at the low-hanging fruit in our tax system. The Liberals have rolled back the Future of Financial Advice reforms, to which even the banks put up some token resistance. The Medicare $7.00 payment is a big sticking point; the AMA proposal that a smaller fee actually go to the doctor suggests a problem in salaries for your neighbourhood GP. Plus they've repealed the carbon tax/trading mechanism (call it what you will), which was generating revenue. Oh, and the mining tax. And they don't have the intestinal fortitude to take on boondoggles like negative gearing. And they've pressed the Australian Tax Office to reduce its staff. Labor was at least on the right track with the tax reform on corporate rental cars, but of course that went by the board with the loss of the election.
Someone argued last week that the Liberals have had trouble making the moral case for their budget. That would work if there was any discernible morality in the budget, of which there seems to be very little indeed. We are poorly served by the current mob in a way that cannot be said of their predecessors. They were elected without sufficient scrutiny, and all claims to the contrary have evaporated as soon as any pressure has been put on them. The budget is a collection of talking points from secretive ideologically-driven bodies such as the IPA, which proves the lack of capacity to develop policy within the Liberal party, and the personal connection between Tony Abbot and the likes of a certain Herald-Sun-affiliated television talk show host suggests that morality might well be present, but not the sort one would bring to mixed company. Looking at how things seem to work, alley cats come to mind.
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