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Can you imagine a time when a government cuts income tax but, rather than making sure everyone knows about its generosity, tries not to draw attention to the fact? That time is today. You could be forgiven for having forgotten, but from today we'll be getting tax cuts worth up to $41.35 a week.

So why on earth would the Prime Minister want to keep us in the dark? Perhaps because only the 2 per cent of income-earners on more than $180,000 a year will get that nice little surprise.

Most of the 90 per cent of workers on incomes less than $80,000 a year will be getting a cut of just $2.88 a week - not even enough for a milkshake, let alone a sandwich - save for those earning between $35,000 and $64,000, who'll get a princely $5.77 a week. The 8 per cent of workers on incomes between $80,000 and $180,000 will get between $2.88 a week and $41.35 a week.

Now perhaps you see why the Government hasn't been keen to trumpet the good news. In terms of dollar savings and - more significantly - as a proportion of income, these cuts are biased heavily in favour of high-income earners.

Although the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, boasted that his budget in May was "very Labor", that hardly describes his tax cuts - which isn't surprising considering they were designed by the Liberals. As you recall, the former treasurer Peter Costello popped up at the start of the 2007 election campaign and promised another three years worth of tax cuts, but Kevin Rudd lost little time in pinching the Liberals' policy.

But however profligate or piddling you find this week's tax cuts, be sure to savour them because they're likely to be the second last you see for a long, long time.

That this week's cuts are either piddling or unfair is only one reason for Rudd to be ashamed of them, however. The other is that they're now quite inappropriate to the radically changed circumstances we find ourselves in following the global financial crisis.

It was irresponsible of Costello to promise a row of tax cuts three years into an unknown future. And it was just as irresponsible for Rudd to match him. A case of counting your budget surpluses before they'd hatched.

We now know those projected surpluses have disappeared in a sea of red ink. Once Rudd saw we'd be pulled down into the global recession, he realised tax cuts weren't the way to go. Rather, what we needed was big one-off, flat cash bonuses, aimed at those most likely to spend them and paid out within a few weeks. When the severity of the global recession had become more apparent by February, he announced another round of cash bonuses, taking the total cost to $22 billion. The success of those grants in bolstering consumer spending is now clear for all to see. But having correctly judged that cash grants were superior to tax cuts, Rudd should have abandoned the two remaining but now redundant tax cuts.

Full Story Here:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/tax ... -d3q7.html

Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia

Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining

October 26, 2008

By John Pilger
Source: The Guardian

John Pilger's ZSpace Page
Its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society's Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people.

The facts are not in dispute: thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40; an entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities; suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children.

In 2005, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination described the racism of the Australian state, a distinction afforded no other developed country. This was in the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families. They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those David Irving used to promote Holocaust denial.

Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians. In 2006, the flagship current affairs programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of "sex slavery" among the Mutitjulu people in the Northern Territory. The programme's source, described as an "anonymous youth worker", was later exposed as a federal government official whose "evidence" was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and the police.

The ABC has never retracted its allegations, claiming it has been "exonerated by an internal inquiry". Shortly before last year's election, Howard declared a "national emergency" and sent the army to the Northern Territory to "protect the children" who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in "unthinkable numbers".

Last February, with much sentimental fanfare, the new prime minister, Labor's Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the first Australians. Australia was said to be finally coming to terms with its rapacious past and present. Was it? "The Rudd government," noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, "has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre."

In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the "national emergency", 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the "unthinkable numbers". They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia. What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was "quarantined". Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: "To see decent, caring [Aboriginal] fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage."

What the doctors found they already knew -- children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are "economically unviable". The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world's biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it.

Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world's largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root -- a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard's "mate". "The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse," says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, "but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump."

What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserve humanity's support.

http://www.johnpilger.com

oh qld have been spending tons on roads and such. tunnel etc. unskilled labourers are on $45ph no idea how much tradesmen are getting