What gets me is that if we’re gonna have a military, you’d really think it would be strategically necessary for us to have our own ship building capabilities.

Else, what, a war breaks out and we just twiddle our thumbs if we then need to repair them? What is the point of a military if we can’t provide our own weapons?

May as well just save the money and spend it on something that improves the material lives of people

Why are we not employing our own people to build these? Makes no sense, to me at least

You’d think you could do that from practically any where, unless they’re actually bolstering local server security, which I doubt.

I really wonder when we (Australia and New Zealand) will wake up to the massive geopolitical risk it is to be tied to any one super power.

As middling powers (well, us, not New Zealand), we really ought to not attach ourselves to the US.

Qantas doing data collection? Ooooh boy what could go wrong!? Definitely nothing to worry about there

Powerless my arse, that should surely qualify under EPA noise laws. They were extremely loud, at 12:40AM

How could they not be moved on for that?

I just assumed it was some football hooligans or something benign like that

Fuckwits

Recycling: waste vegans.

The Germans are probably upset with this comparison

What for a nonsense. Do these other countries not sort their waste or what? Do they not know about efficiency? Next thing you’re going to tell me they don’t sort their white, green and brown glass separately.

Thanks for the response. Yeah I should probably also emphasise that I have a soft-spot for the ABC and criticise it’s current state out of love.

I just am a bit sad that not much as really happened in the last 10 years to improve it (structurally), in my opinion.

I am still glad, as you mention, that we at least have one large news source outside the corporate media.

Again, this is what we call investment risk. Investments that don’t up beyond inflation are a bad investment. Which is the risk you take in order to see a potential profit.

That’s not our collective problem.

Giving people a discount to subsidise their profits is not a worthwhile way to spend our tax dollars.

People still invested before this discount was granted, so I’m not really convinced it would break anything by getting rid of it

I thought employment rate has been at record lows these last couple years?

We are in a service economy, which hasn’t been as exposed to mechanical automation. You think there are still going to be as many jobs in the service industry of we automate it all? You think the market gives two shits about human dignity and keeping us employed?

We’re already shipping as many service jobs as we can to cheaper places. You think this doesn’t have an effect on our future employment prospects?

If you take out housing payments/rents as they’re due to the housing crisis that’s definitely not true

Are you hearing yourself?

If you’re on 2 incomes and struggling with a paid off house you’re doing something wrong

This is such a brain-dead, out of touch take.

How exactly are people, who don’t own a home, supposed to get to that point? With piles, and piles of debt, for houses that have gone up, way, way, way beyond inflation.

If they have no relatives who already own property, they are even more truly fucked.

I moved out of home in 2016. I worked 2 days a week on the weekend while studying. I did not apply for Centrelink and managed to get by because I managed to find a pretty cheap place to rent.

This shit is not possible today. And even in 2016 rent was already starting to become expensive I just got lucky.

Housing is THE problem of our generation.

I’ve managed to get “on the property ladder” but we’re quickly pulling it up behind us for many, many people.

And the fact you think corporations, who clearly do not have humanity’s best interest at heart, will actually drive real wage growth, with AI, is frankly hilarious.

I think you’re forgetting we live under capitalism, every job that can be removed, will be removed.

Automation will only end up being a net positive for society if we radically alter our economic system.

Automation to this level is not the same as industrialisation or the motormobile, we’re not creating nearly enough jobs to offset those that would be lost in the process.

All at a time at which 2 incomes barely covers living expenses for many people, where 1 used to cover a house, a wife and 3 kids.

$4,300 extra over 10 years? Press X to doubt AI will have anything to do with it.

I feel like there would be a much more elegant solution to this than just waiving 50% of your taxable income from investments. Especially since asset prices typically go up during periods of inflation, above inflation.

Running with your example, I’ll pretend I bought $1,000,000 in assets 1 year ago, inflation was 10%, and my assets returned a 10% capital gain (I’ll pretend there are no dividends), and I sell for a 10% profit.

Under the current system I made $100,000 as income, and let’s say I sell exactly one year after, so I’m eligible for the capital gains discount.

If I don’t work, this means I only pay tax on $50,000, which is a tax bill of $5,788 (2024-25 tax brackets). Meaning your profit would be ($100,000-5,788)/$1,000,000 = 9.4212%.

If it were the full $100,00 it would be $20,788. So 7.9212% profit, in nominal terms.

You may look at this and go, SEE, you’re actually making a loss so it’s not fair to tax it at the full rate! But this all entirely ignores the fact that periods of inflation have almost always resulted in asset price inflation.

If they wanna make it that you pay tax only on real gains, then I’m gonna argue they ought to do the same for income from actually working. But this would be a disaster for the budget.

We’re being jibbed by people who make money by not working. The argument that the asset has gone down in real terms is the investors problem. As investing involves risk which you wear in order to make a potential profit.

Stop socialising losses in the form of real value loss. That is the investors problem. I don’t see how it’s fair for a worker earning $100,000 to pay $20,788 in tax, but an investor to only pay $5788.

“Tough on crime” has always been political theatre. There’s been so many studies on this it’s not even funny.

You don’t solve crime by jailing a bunch of people.

Just look at the USA, crime rate through the roof compared to Australia, yet they are the 5th most incarcerated people on the planet by capita and largest by total amount.

Tough on crime doesn’t work, it’s only to dupe people into re-electing politicians with no better policies.

Want to exercise your democratic rights? Please pay at the next window

Until we remove the levers of funding from the government of the day (currently via passing the budget), stop government Ministers from having powers to direct the ABC on matters of national interest (Section 78 of the ABC Act), and make the organisation run democratically, it’s never going to stop being soft on the government of the day, nor be able to actually stand up to corporations or lobby groups.

GetUp’s campaign on saving the ABC was such a joke to me because they kept saying “save the ABC, save the ABC” and only talking about protesting budget cuts, which is incredibly short-sighted.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that organisations are much less likely to bite the hand that feeds it.

The ABC has been plagued with allegations of bias for years, and because they’re not really independent, they kow-tow way too often.

Never forget what they did to David McBride.

I think it’s time to link ABC funding to inflation or something via the constitution or some other more concrete mechanism than simply legislation, and make all employees have a say in the running of the organisation. A workers coop that just so happens to be a government organisation (obviously with checks to ensure they can still have funding revoked if the org goes completely off the rails, and that they can’t just decide, hmmm, let’s just not hire new people and share the funding between a smaller group of employees. I doubt this would with democratisation, though)

Pay to protest would have been farcical.

Absolutely, why we let you halve your taxable income for investments is beyond me.

Work for your money? All of that is taxable. Let your money work for you? Ooooooh poor baby, let’s half that taxable income shall we? Ooooh you didn’t work at all, let me refund you 30% of your dividends back to you, oh dear, oh dear gorgeous.

It’s stated in my contract, but also this is the appropriate award for enginners: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/awards-summary/ma000065-summary#who-the-professional-award-covers

Unfortunately as it currently stands, I’m not entitled to overtime because of clause (section? I dunno the terminology) 18.6 of the award https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html#_Toc201323508

I’m hoping that this legislation ties the hands of the fair work commission so that I don’t have to work 2 “extra reasonable hours of overtime” each week for free.

As they should. If we’re going to barely lift our finger to prevent see level rise, we ought to take them in

I wouldn’t worry about it, looks fine while scrolling:

Yes, but also this would be a huge scandal which would no doubt come out.

As much as this is a pretty big fuck up, I have decent trust in the integrity of the vast majority of public servants. (Not to say that information isn’t ever massaged or suppressed in the public service, just that a conspiracy of this magnitude would not stay quiet).

Give it a couple of months. If it really is a conspiracy, I bet we’ll find out.

This is extremely unreasonable. It should be on record how an individual MP voted on every single bill. How else are we supposed to hold them to account?