Jobs for Australian
Malcolm Turnbull wants you to help him figure out what policies will create jobs for Australia.
http://www.jobsforaustralia.com
I quite like these initiatives where they ask average Aussies for their input. However I don’t know if the people that sponsor these idea collection exercises actually read the submissions. Hopefully the quality will be a little higher than Kevin07s 2020 and Turnbull will find them worth reading.
My submission was to set the minimum wage regionally rather than nationally and to remove payroll tax or else make the tax free payroll threshold somewhat dependent on the number of employees. Feel free to share your ideas with the ALS and/or with Mr Turnbull.
Rudd is positioning the ALP as the anti-capitalists. It would seem that Turnbull wants to position the Liberals as the party of Jobs. I wonder which message will attract the most votes? 
The tax cut that wasn’t
A few days ago I wrote an op-ed for the Business Spectator called Taxation Rhetoric and Reality, which discusses the real impact of an increase in low-income tax offset (LITO).
The LITO is a complex tax change which has its real impact hidden in the official tax rates. In effect, an increase in the LITO increases the tax-free threshold (a good thing) and increases the marginal tax rates for some working people (a bad thing).
The ALP has proposed an increase in LITO. The effect of this will be to cut the marginal tax rate for people earning $14,000 to $16,000… but it will also increase the marginal tax rates for people earning $60,000 to $67,500.
Instead of adjusting the deceptive LITO, it would be better if the government simply increased the tax-free threshold.
Soccer Must Be Banned
The Manly Daily has been at the forefront of a campaign to ban teenage kids from jumping into the water off Manly Wharf and at Jump Rock (see above for rare footage of a an admirably performed backflip at Jump Rock). It is, they say, for their ‘own safety.’ Sydney Ferries warned jumpers risked
‘being sucked up into the ferry’s large propellers, swept under the wharf and ripping their skin to shreds on the razor-sharp barnacles covering pylons or hitting their head and losing consciousness.’
It is not actually known how many people have been ‘sucked into the ferry’s propellors’, or have had their skin ‘ripped to shreds’ or have ‘lost consciousness’ but so serious is this crime that the police are now permitted to hand out $1,500 fines to these criminals (versus $200 for shoplifting).
We at the ALS wholeheartedly agree with the Manly Daily and support their campaign. In fact, we cannot understand how soccer, a far more dangerous activity than rock jumping is still permitted in any civilised society.
The following is an extract from a press release from the ALS’s very own John Humphrys,
“The problem with soccer is that heading objects can cause brain damage. A number of peer-reviewed studies have shown that soccer players are more likely to have mild traumatic brain injury. In 1998, Dutch researchers showed that professional soccer players suffered from deterioration in memory, planning and visual-perceptual tasks.
“Obviously, this calls for government intervention. Initially we should introduce heavy taxes on soccer, introduce regulation to limit the number of times a person can head the ball, restrict soccer games to government approved venues and require soccer players to register with a mental health watch organisation. The long term plan should be to phase out and eventually ban soccer.
“We understand that some people still hold on to out-dated notions about individual freedoms, and would defend the right of people to make their own decision about their life choices and the risks they take. But safety is more important than freedom.
“Anybody who defends the freedom of soccer players is really just promoting brain damage. This issue is no different from the issue of smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods or riding a bicycle without a helmet. Freedom should not extend to any of these dangerous activities. People should only be free to do the things that the government approves. And if the government really does want to protect its citizens from themselves, then it should not allow soccer.”
Please sign up now and join our campaign to promote safety awareness amongst the young. Thankyou.
You can’t take a “good” drug down. Markets will always find a good way around the problem
Slate a good story on smoking (and tobacco) that is sure to send the tobacco Nazis crazy.
While LA County is implementing a ban on smoking even in your own apartment and smoking consumption is falling about 3% per year, smokeless tobacco products are making their way in the market.
So tobacco is doomed, right?
Wrong. Smoking may be doomed, but tobacco is evolving into more elusive prey. Or, perhaps I should say, a more elusive predator. As Kevin Helliker reports in the Wall Street Journal, the industry is going smokeless.
Altria Group Inc., the nation’s largest cigarette maker, this month completed its $10.3 billion purchase of UST Inc., the biggest smokeless-tobacco maker and owner of the Copenhagen and Skoal brands. Reynolds American Inc., which owns Conwood Co., a discount smokeless purveyor, this month announced that the Camel Snus brand has performed well enough in test markets to warrant national distribution.
And
[M]ore Americans are continuing to give up smoking, helping to push cigarette consumption down about 3% each year. … Morgan Stanley estimates that U.S. consumers spent $4.77 billion on smokeless tobacco in 2007 versus $78 billion on cigarettes. Smokeless-tobacco sales have been increasing about 5% or more a year. … “There are probably in excess of 400,000 adults switching to smokeless each year,” says Seth Moskowitz, a spokesman for Reynolds American.
And it’s becoming less carcinogenic:
One recent study showed that some newer brands, with names like Ariva, Camel Snus and Marlboro Snus, have sharply lower levels of a dangerous carcinogen than do older varieties of smokeless tobacco, such as Copenhagen and Skoal. Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, which sets health standards in the United Kingdom, has said smokeless tobacco is between one-tenth and one-one thousandth as hazardous as smoking, depending on the specific product.
The December study also found that Marlboro Snus contained a very low level of nicotine. By contrast, Camel Snus offers a jolt of nicotine that “has the potential to satisfy those smokers who are looking for a substitute to smoking, and to keep them addicted to this product,” the authors said.Tobacco is evolving and escaping for two fundamental reasons. One is that it can be engineered into new forms. The other is that the problem targeted by legislation—the weed’s tendency to cause cancer—isn’t essential to the tobacco business.
So the upshot is that a good drug like nicotine will still be with us for a long time and the only change is how some people who like to use it will be finding products to consume that are less harmful.
This should of course bitterly disappoint people like Harry Clark.
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