Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Taxation

  • AUSTRALIA

    Big ticket promises won't help our hidden millions

    • Claire Victory
    • 19 May 2022
    1 Comment

    There is an Australia that many people seldom encounter and its citizens number in the millions. These citizens live in all cities and regional towns, often in sub-standard yet costly housing, and struggle to survive week to week on low wages or inadequate government assistance.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    April is the cruellest month

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 April 2022
    6 Comments

    Palm Sunday alternates between March and April. When, as this year, it is celebrated in April it keeps company with a number of days that provoke us to ask what and who matter, what and whom can you trust. If it is a cruel month, it is so because it tests, even mocks, our comfortable assumptions. In a year overshadowed by manifestations of climate change, of persistence of Covid and of the horrors of war, it is not a bad month to endure an election.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    What will rising interest rates mean for wealth inequality?

    • David James
    • 01 March 2022
    3 Comments

    Australia’s Reserve Bank mainly concentrates on keeping inflation within an acceptable range and maintaining a high level of employment. Social equity has never been considered to be part of its mandate. It should be. Interest rates have been the biggest cause of economic and social division in Australia, not just between rich and poor, but also between older and younger generations. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Betting on the future of Australia’s gambling addiction

    • Frank Hurley
    • 24 February 2022
    1 Comment

    Gambling is now a core national industry providing significant employment, profit for private providers and revenue for governments. All good but, as with every form of industry, there are ‘externalities’. In the case of the gambling industry, it is the personal and social costs of ‘problem’ or ‘addicted’ gamblers that must be taken into account. 

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    The tangled strands of Christmas

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 December 2021
    19 Comments

    Christmas is always a mixture of nostalgia, weariness, connection and hope. This year the strands that compose it are even more tangled. We hope to return to the pre-Covid normal of celebration without anxiety. We look forward to the New Year as a gate to freedom to travel, work and plan our lives without hindrance. At the same time, however, our plans are conditional.  We realise that Covid has not left us, and that its mutations may lead to more interruptions and restrictions.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Labor’s embrace of Liberal tax policies leaves poor worse off

    • Chris Smith
    • 31 August 2021
    11 Comments

    In July, Anthony Albanese announced a significant change of stance on Labor tax policy which was disappointing, if not surprising. An elected Labor government, Albanese promised, would keep the coming high income tax cuts he previously opposed. This decision to not oppose the government proposal to restructure the income tax system through reduced marginal rates is supporting a government policy that will lead to a significant redistribution of wealth towards high income earners.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Let them pick fruit

    • Vivienne Cowburn
    • 13 October 2020
    19 Comments

    An idea that’s gaining traction, in a pandemic where international travel has stopped and many Australians are losing their jobs, is this notion that the unemployed (aka: everyone on JobSeeker payments) should go out into the regions and help the farmers pick fruit.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Class and COVID-19

    • David James
    • 17 September 2020
    5 Comments

    The issue of class, economic inequality, has for some time been conspicuously absent in contemporary political debate. In the wake of COVID-19, which will greatly exacerbate income and wealth disparities, such inattention must be addressed.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Let's not snap back but spring forward

    • John Falzon
    • 10 April 2020
    25 Comments

    Already the ideological die-hards of neoliberalism are working out how the pandemic might be manipulated to lower wages and to snap back to the old economic normal. So now is when collectively we need to take over the framing and the forming of the future. Not to snap back but to spring forward.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Budget 2019 boosts inequality

    • John Falzon
    • 03 April 2019
    13 Comments

    The much trumpeted projected budget surplus is built on the backs of people who are left out and often made to feel that they are left over, surplus to the economy: people on low pay or no pay, young people, sole parents, people experiencing homelessness, people living with a disability.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Charity is no substitute for justice

    • John Falzon
    • 22 March 2019
    13 Comments

    The work of charities, including the generous work of volunteers, should not be a means of letting governments off the hook. People do not want to have to rely on charity; they want to be able to count on justice. And charity is never a substitute for justice. But it becomes so when governments abrogate their responsibilities.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Burning down the house of inequality

    • John Falzon
    • 28 June 2018
    7 Comments

    If you accept the tenets of individualism, you are going to struggle to see why we should have anything but the most minimal level of taxation, and you wouldn't hold that taxation should be progressive to be fair. But the reality is that inequality is a political failure; not a personal one.

    READ MORE