Word: howard
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...Howard, as he told the Menzies Research Centre last month, the FTB issue represents the great philosophical divide in Australian politics, between "a Labor party which thinks government should direct people's behavior and a Coalition which sees its role as letting families make up their own minds." That's strange, because Howard's policies have been quite prescriptive when it comes to certain families, such as those headed by sole parents...
...certain (means-tested) benefits as income rises leads to high effective marginal tax rates. For some families in the middle-income tiers, it means they lose 70? for each extra dollar earned. So a second earner, usually a woman, is discouraged from seeking work. That may be O.K. for Howard's coffee mums, but for many women with education and skills, there is no effective choice at all. A tight labor market and an ageing society need their talents; if they don't return to work within a few years, even via a marginal attachment, they tend to be lost...
...study of the tax treatment of families under the Howard government-and of the general thrust of two decades of tax reform-by Professor Patricia Apps from the University of Sydney is revealing. She found that the combination of tax cuts and additional family payments in recent years has produced a dual shift in the tax burden: the largest income gains are going to single-earner families and to those at the top of the earnings tree...
...measures in Peter Costello's 11th Budget-particularly better child-care arrangements-show that the Howard government isn't completely deaf to concerns about female workforce participation. But the inadequacy of the changes to FTB rest on a simple truth: after a decade of constructing a family-welfare state on this scale, major improvements aren't likely to come from the architects. Labor leader Kim Beazley's support crew is mulling over the implications of the trends in tax and welfare. Beazley is now pitching to the middle; the tax burden, workplace insecurity, high petrol prices and interest-rate rises...
...brass rounds I was pressing into its magazine, might explode at any moment. I still handle guns with caution-the first rule of firearms safety is to treat every gun as if it's loaded. But I now know that to call them evil, as Australian Prime Minister John Howard recently did, is a statement of good-hearted ignorance...