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Permalink Reply by Martin Essenberg on July 20, 2010 at 4:45pm

The GST on excise was well known at the time and as far as I am aware neither Howard or Rudd ever corrected it.

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Permalink Reply by Rae Billett on July 20, 2010 at 5:56pm

Roger glad you brought that up, you said:

"As far as I am aware, if it is possible, without the GST, the Labor State Governments would be 'more broke' than they are now."

As far as I am aware, the state governments were to remove many taxes for their share of the GST, NSW didn't and they are far more broke than the other states anyway.

They say it is because they didn't get a big enough slice of the GST. I don't believe that though more money more rorts and they did not take away the taxes they promised they would. Hence the state of NSW is totally stuffed after what is it now 15 years?

We get to rid ourselves of this state 'Labour' government early next year. Labour was what the party was called before Ameriocans stuffed up the English language.

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Permalink Reply by Roger Rankin Crook on July 20, 2010 at 6:43pm

When did Labour become Labor? I may be wrong but it was a Whitlam Labor Government, was it before then?

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Permalink Reply by Rae Billett on July 20, 2010 at 7:03pm

Peter you are a stirrer. They probably think if they help the Feds they will get in again in NSW in a pig's eye.

What a bloody pity state elections are every 4 years, we would be rid of them now.

Jeezus, Canberra? where's that?

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Permalink Reply by Roger Rankin Crook on July 20, 2010 at 7:14pm

I follow the example of WSC.
A civil servant had gone out of his way to be grammatically correct, and had clumsily avoided ending a sentence with a preposition. Churchill scribbled in the margin: 'This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.'

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Permalink Reply by Rae Billett on July 20, 2010 at 8:26pm

PS. From Al,

And to Rae below, please stop telling Labor how to improve JG's performance. A number of us jumped on KR, our best asset towards getting rid of this dreadful, spin-besotted government, and look where that got us! We lost him!!

So Rae, praise Julia's wonderful hand gestures and boring, repetitive, unconvincing delivery to the heavens! Let's have a lot more of 'Moving Forward', 'Building the Education Revolution', 'Australian Working Families' and all her other wonderful sloganism, delivered in that flat monotone. It's magic ;-) alan

ummm... No Al, if it bloody annoys me I will say so. You know that.....

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Permalink Reply by Roger Rankin Crook on July 22, 2010 at 3:57pm

The ALP adopted the formal name "Australian Labour Party" in 1908, but changed the spelling to "Labor" in 1912. While it is standard practice in Australian English both today and at the time to spell the word labour with a "u", the party was influenced by the United States labor movement and a prominent figure in the early history of the party, the North American–born King O'Malley, was successful in having the spelling "modernised".[20] The change also made it easier to distinguish references to the party from the labour movement in general.[21] Furthermore, the spelling "labor" had been acceptable in both British and Australian English in earlier periods. (See also: Spelling in Australian English
Thanks to Wikepedia. blame King O'Malley!

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Permalink Reply by Martin Essenberg on July 22, 2010 at 5:47pm

Ok you as a business person might not have liked the Sales tax- but the rest of us didn't have to pay it except on luxury items.

Now we all pay all the time.

The other issue with it is that there was no canvassing of options- it was the ideological decision that we had to have a GST whether we liked it or not and Howard just had to lie that it was over to get elected- just as Abbott is doing with Work Choices. Then in power it is suddenly back on the agenda with the government throwing hundreds of millions of taxpayers money at the advertising campaign to convince us.

At least Labor has had the Henry report to indicate where tax should go - even though I understand they are now ignoring that.

On the issue of the ALP slogun "moving Forward" There have been slogans forever. The "Its Time" one of Gough Whitlam was quite successful. The Libs seem to have one a "Our action contract"- which seems lame and dangerous to me coming from them.

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Permalink Reply by Colin J Ely on July 22, 2010 at 6:34pm

Martin
As I understand it, most items had Sales Tax, not just 'luxury' items.
I believe part of the deal was to deal with the 'black' economy.

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Permalink Reply by Martin Essenberg on July 22, 2010 at 6:55pm

Colin- and did it deal with the "black" economy? Is there to be a review of what was promised and what the consequences actually were?

If I choose to buy a product in a shop and it doesn't do what it was supposed to I can take it back.

Some 2 million people signed petitions opposing the GST. It was forced upon us anyway- and it continues to be forced upon us.

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Permalink Reply by Roger Rankin Crook on July 22, 2010 at 9:57pm

Just 14% of the workforce are in a Union. To me that is a minority.

Governments are elected by swings in marginal seats. So all a Party has to do is appeal to a minority in a marginal seat and they get elected.

Poor way to run a country. Look at Fremantle in WA. In the State it went to the Greens. Fremantle wants power 24 hours of the day yet they are against power stations that are just down the road. Fremantle is he gateway to WA, it is our main Port. Yet they don't want the traffic.

Beats me.

As someone has already said, you never, obviously, had to battle your way through sales tax.

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Permalink Reply by Colin J Ely on July 22, 2010 at 10:38pm

Roger
I was always taught that 40% of people would vote Liberal if they put up a donkey as a candidate, ditto for the 40% who vote ALP, elections are decided by the remaining 20% who are, swinging voters. I think that in 2007 people were feeling jaded by John Howard, plus the ALP/Unions ran a smart campaign on Workchoices. Personally, even though I am a member of a union, I have never had anyone point out to me how I was worse off under Workchoices. Sadly, I think the other thing that did john in was AGW, He was the only sane one, who was prepared to wait for the evidence, unfortunately our mug population swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. The forces of good have to fight the forces of evil by running the same kind of scare campaign on the ALP/Greens preference deal.

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