Diary of our stinking Govt.

[boris1gary]

As it's more than 100 days now, it has been suggested that a new thread was needed.  The current govt has been breaking promises and telling lies at a rate so fast it's hard to keep up.

This below is worrying, "independent" pffft, as if your own doctor is somehow what? biased, it's ridiculous. So far there is talk of only including people under a certain age 30-35, for now. Remember that if your injured in a car, injured at work or get ill, you too might need to go on the DSP. They have done a similar think in the UK with devastating consequences.

and this is the 2nd time recently where the Govt has referred to work as welfare???? So when you go to work tomorrow (or tuesday), just remember that's welfare.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-20/disability-pensioners-may-be-reassessed-kevin-andrews/5400598

Independent doctors could be called in to reassess disability pensioners, Federal Government says

The Federal Government is considering using independent doctors to examine disability pensioners and assess whether they should continue to receive payments.

Currently family doctors provide reports supporting claims for the Disability Support Pension (DSP).

But Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews is considering a measure that would see independent doctors reassess eligibility.

"We are concerned that where people can work, the best form of welfare is work," Mr Andrews said at a press conference.

[boris1gary]

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@am*3 wrote:
"Tony Abbott’s Coalition was a very effective Opposition indeed, "

Now his is a very hopeless Prime Minister...that's more important than what he did or didn't do as Opposition Leader.

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effective, yes as damp is effective for creating mold, saying no all the time wasn't really that hard, was it? Anything else is beyond him.

[cherry*135]

 aren't graphs just marvelous...

only if they are pretty.

[cherry*135]

Edit: same article as post 765, different title.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2014

No handouts for miners not paying enough tax

...In the case of mining, however, there's a complication. Though the powers that be don't trumpet the fact, mining is about 80 per cent foreign-owned. Even BHP Billiton is, essentially, a foreign company. And most of the extensive capital equipment mining uses is imported.

The Labor government bungled its attempt to ensure the miners' profits were adequately taxed. But, rather than correcting Labor's errors, Tony Abbott has pledged to abolish the tax and let the foreign miners off the hook. Then he'll wonder why the huge expansion in mining production we're now seeing is creating so few jobs.

It gets worse. Not only are we under-taxing the miners, we're giving them lots of subsidies. Not only does the federal government give them a rebate on the excise on their diesel fuel, the state governments give them assistance by building the roads, railways and ports they need to ship their minerals abroad.

As Ian McAuley, of the University of Canberra, has pointed out, we're slashing our planned spending on foreign aid because we can no longer afford such generosity, but by abolishing the mining tax we're being very generous to big foreign mining companies. This makes sense?

http://www.rossgittins.com/2014/06/no-handouts-for-miners-not-paying.html

 No

[monman12]

"I have come across many different political persuasions over the years, all sorts - never have I heard such tripe, such an apologist line for big, big business , those resources that after all are in our country, ours - all of us - for mining companies (among others), who are given huge tax breaks already to be required to return a small part of the profits to the nation is only fair - not "gimme gimme", it's not the Australian people who are "gimme gimme", it's the multinationals who are the greedy ones. "

I guess you are so used to the standard C&P sans reading, because you obviously missed this:

"The mining industry's contribution to the Australian economy is now $121 billion a year. In terms of export income, it generates $138 billion per annum, which represents over half (54 per cent) of total goods and services. Across the nation mining employs 187,400 people directly, and a further 599,680 in support industries. In wages and salaries that amounts to $18 billion; an additional $21 billion is contributed through company tax and royalty payments. Not least, the industry spends $35.2 billion on new capital investment, $5.7 billion on exploration, and $4.2 billion on research and development."

"huge tax breaks" ? I suggest you read , and try and appreciate the above figures.

"Return a small part of of the profits to the nation" ?   I suggest you read , and try and appreciate the above figures.

"it's the multinationals who are the greedy ones."  Obviously, like the Australia-registered BHP Billiton Limited  which has a primary listing on the Australian Securities Exchange  and is the largest company in Australia measured by market capitalisation."

If you think that your form of  socialist "gimme"  is not being addressed, buy some shares and participate in the huge (? I suggest you read , and try and appreciate the above figures) tax breaks and profit, because  it is obvious that you have little/no practical knowledge of  investments or bottom line economics, other than "gimme", or what others write if it  sounds "good" to you.

Finally,  I suggest you read , and try and appreciate,  the above figures in the earlier paragraph.

nɥºɾ

[cherry*135]

The mining industry's contribution to the Australian economy is now $121 billion a year. In terms of export income, it generates $138 billion per annum, which represents over half (54 per cent) of total goods and services.

Though the powers that be don't trumpet the fact, mining is about 80 per cent foreign-owned. Even BHP Billiton is, essentially, a foreign company. 

Not only are we under-taxing the miners, we're giving them lots of subsidies. Not only does the federal government give them a rebate on the excise on their diesel fuel, the state governments give them assistance by building the roads, railways and ports they need to ship their minerals abroad.

It turns out the Queenslanders' subsidies to mining are equivalent to almost 60 per cent of the royalties they receive. In WA it's about a quarter, and in NSW it's less than 10 per cent. In Victoria, however, it's three-quarters.

Across the nation mining employs 187,400 people directly, and a further 599,680 in support industries. In wages and salaries that amounts to $18 billion; an additional $21 billion is contributed through company tax and royalty payments. Not least, the industry spends $35.2 billion on new capital investment, $5.7 billion on exploration, and $4.2 billion on research and development.

Mining may account for 10 per cent of our total production, but it accounts for only about 2 per cent of total employment. Building new mines is labour intensive, but running them isn't.

And most of the extensive capital equipment mining uses is imported.

If mining creates so few jobs directly, and so little of its profits accrue to Australians, that leaves two key concerns to ensure Australians get suitable recompense for the exploitation of our natural inheritance: make sure miners pay adequate royalties on the minerals we grant them and make sure their profits are adequately taxed.

Tony Abbott has pledged to abolish the tax and let the foreign miners off the hook. Then he'll wonder why the huge expansion in mining production we're now seeing is creating so few jobs.

[boris1gary]

Am, you might have already read this but just in case......very very funny and not a graph in sight - censored for CS.

Miners dig the Age of Entitlement

Man, it's a lucky thing the Age of Entitlement is over. That was a bleeped close run thing wasn't it? bleep those greedy pensioners and school teachers, and selfish nurses and arrogant fire fighters, bleep them all to hell. Always putting their hands out for another dollar, possibly even $1.50, the cheeky bleepards. Don't they realise every precious dollar they suck off the welfare **bleep** is an almost infinitesimally small amount that can't go to some deserving multinational mining company and the wealthy shareholders who invest in it?

Of course they don't, because anybody who'd object to taking money from an indigenous literacy program or a women's shelter and giving it to somebody useful like a giant bleep mining company is just a stupid lefty and probably doesn't even want the wealthy super elites to be wealthy or even really super anymore. That's your politics of envy, right there mate. And that's why people are angry about the Australia Institute's so-called revelation tax-payer funded subsidies to mining companies cost $18 billion over the last six years, more than half of that money being bleeped up against the polished marble wall in Queensland.

You remember Queensland. The place with the yawning budget hole which needed filling in with the bodies of fifteen thousand executed public servants.

Of course people are going to be angry when a bunch of know-nothing know-it-alls use their fancy maths and big school thinking to argue the largest and most profitable companies in the land didn't need all the billions of dollars they took out of the back pockets of ordinary taxpayers. Especially since they sent most of the tens of billions of dollars they made to a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Where they don't have to pay any tax.

That will make a lot of of people very very angry, because those people, many of them managing directors and board members of mining companies, care a lot about mining companies and the small number of people they employ, and the even smaller number of people who own shares in them.

But it's not just hard working owners of mining companies. Lots of other people care so much about mining companies which don't employ them and which pay minimal tax, that the previous government's attempt to grab a little bit of that lolly back saw them destroyed by a propaganda campaign, funded by those wealthy mining companies. You see? You see now, how having wealthy mining companies benefits everyone who owns shares in wealthy mining companies? Or in large advertising agencies?

Or the media companies where they place their most effective propaganda?

I for one am glad the miners in Queensland have trousered $9.5 billion dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies that might otherwise have been spent on all the services the Queensland government has cut back or abolished. Because if we hadn't sacked all those lazy, greedy public servants, and got rid of all of that waste and inefficiency, why, the Age of Entitlement might still be with us. It's possible, and I don't want to alarm you, but it is totally possible some wealthy mining company owner somewhere might have had to make do with a slightly smaller yacht or Manhattan town house.

And that, I'm sure you'd agree, would be an absolute tragedy. For the owners of mining companies.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/blogs/blunt-instrument/miners-dig-the-age-of-entitlement-201...

[monman12]

"If mining creates so few jobs directly, and so little of its profits accrue to Australians, that leaves two key concerns to ensure Australians get suitable recompense for the exploitation of our natural inheritance: make sure miners pay adequate royalties on the minerals we grant them and make sure their profits are adequately taxed."

What a narrow outlook,  profits are available to those that invest i.e. the company  which is its shareholders. BHP has over 120 billion in assets, you want some of its profits, buy some shares or persuade the Australian government (you) to buy the whole company. 

If Australians are not prepared to invest fully (or as majority shareholders)  in their own country by  purchasing mining company shares, why moan about profits going to any and all who do, just because they are "foreigners"?

So how exactly do you want to satisfy your 'gimme',  because  all I can see is  a standard response to a company and a (misunderstood)  large  $figure, with no apparent understanding of how it is achieved, distributed, or associated basic economics.

Go ahead and increase the government "take", but remember mining is global and not so long ago Olympic Dam was shelved as being uneconomic and currently BHP produce copper from the  Escondida mine in Chile,  which is the world's largest single producer of copper,  also there is plenty of uranium being mined elsewhere.

I see exactly the same hip pocket nerve being activated every time a bank announces its annual profit

"The mining industry's contribution to the Australian economy is now $121 billion a year. In terms of export income, it generates $138 billion per annum, which represents over half (54 per cent) of total goods and services. Across the nation mining employs 187,400 people directly, and a further 599,680 in support industries. In wages and salaries that amounts to $18 billion; an additional $21 billion is contributed through company tax and royalty payments. Not least, the industry spends $35.2 billion on new capital investment, $5.7 billion on exploration, and $4.2 billion on research and development."

BHP Billiton is by far our largest miner and is GLOBAL. It has more overseas employees than in Australia and operates in 25 other countries. How do we sort out the OS profit  from those sources, or do you want that as well?

BHP 5 year div yield is 2.83% and at the end of the same period the share price has been static, some  profit, and I have a parcel of them.

nɥºɾ

[boris1gary]

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@monman12 wrote:

"If mining creates so few jobs directly, and so little of its profits accrue to Australians, that leaves two key concerns to ensure Australians get suitable recompense for the exploitation of our natural inheritance: make sure miners pay adequate royalties on the minerals we grant them and make sure their profits are adequately taxed."

What a narrow outlook,  profits are available to those that invest i.e. the company  which is its shareholders. BHP has over 120 billion in assets, you want some of its profits, buy some shares or persuade the Australian government (you) to buy the whole company. 

If Australians are not prepared to invest fully (or as majority shareholders)  in their own country by  purchasing mining company shares, why moan about profits going to any and all who do, just because they are "foreigners"?

So how exactly do you want to satisfy your 'gimme',  because  all I can see is  a standard response to a company and a (misunderstood)  large  $figure, with no apparent understanding of how it is achieved, distributed, or associated basic economics.

Go ahead and increase the government "take", but remember mining is global and not so long ago Olympic Dam was shelved as being uneconomic and currently BHP produce copper from the  Escondida mine in Chile,  which is the world's largest single producer of copper,  also there is plenty of uranium being mined elsewhere.

I see exactly the same hip pocket nerve being activated every time a bank announces its annual profit

"The mining industry's contribution to the Australian economy is now $121 billion a year. In terms of export income, it generates $138 billion per annum, which represents over half (54 per cent) of total goods and services. Across the nation mining employs 187,400 people directly, and a further 599,680 in support industries. In wages and salaries that amounts to $18 billion; an additional $21 billion is contributed through company tax and royalty payments. Not least, the industry spends $35.2 billion on new capital investment, $5.7 billion on exploration, and $4.2 billion on research and development."

BHP Billiton is by far our largest miner and is GLOBAL. It has more overseas employees than in Australia and operates in 25 other countries. How do we sort out the OS profit  from those sources, or do you want that as well?

BHP 5 year div yield is 2.83% and at the end of the same period the share price has been static, some  profit, and I have a parcel of them.

nɥºɾ

---

so what, so do we - quite a large parcel - share price went up 1 cent after 500 sackings in WA - more to come - yipeeeeeeee, are you beside yourself with glee in anticipation of more sackings?

[bella_again]

Federal Government cuts dementia and severe behaviours payment following budget blow-out

By social affairs correspondent Norman Hermant

Updated 2 hours 8 minutes ago

The Federal Government has cut the dementia and severe behaviours supplement, paid to providers of care for people with severe behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia.

Assistant Minister for Social Services Mitch Fifield has told the Senate the Government had no choice but to eliminate the supplement as of July 31, after its budget blew out by nearly 10 times over.

"I have not taken this decision lightly," Senator Fifield said.

"But there was no other responsible course of action in the circumstances."

The dementia and severe behaviours supplement is only a year old. It provides a payment of $16 a day for each eligible dementia patient in residential care homes.

Figures released by the Department of Social Services show demand for the payment has dramatically outstripped initial projections.

Original estimates indicated 2,000 people in residential care would be eligible. Instead, as of March, more than 25,000 people were receiving the supplement.

The budget for the payment expanded accordingly, from an initial estimate of $11.7 million to $110 million this year.

Loss will impact care, providers say

The peak body for not-for-profit residential care, Aged and Community Services Australia, says the number of those applying for the supplement should not have been a surprise.

"The Government, in creating this very necessary supplement, has grossly underestimated the number of people who should be eligible," the organisation's CEO John Kelly said.

He says losing the supplement will impact care.

"It enables my members across 1,800 facilities around Australia to provide extra support," he said.

"They may be able to put on a specialist, they may be able to put on a person with dementia training ...we're going to miss out on that."

But Alzheimer's Australia CEO Glen Rees says it was clear to his organisation that the supplement had gone off track.

He says the intent was good. The payment was designed to encourage residential care providers to provide more spaces for dementia sufferers with severe behavioural problems – some of the most difficult people to provide care for in Australia.

He says not long after the supplement was launched, it was clear there was a problem: there was no test to determine whether the providers who applied for the supplement could actually provide the appropriate care.

"From our point of view, it was always subject to error because the scheme wasn't accompanied by any definition of those providers likely to able to provide this most difficult level of care," Mr Rees said.

Result a 'travesty' for dementia sufferers

The result was far more recipients than anticipated, and a budget the Government says could reach $1.5 billion over the next 10 years.

Senator Fifield says it is the previous government, which launched the supplement, that should bear the blame.

"This is not a problem of the Government's making," Senator Fifield said.

"But it did fall to this Government to address the situation."

The Government says it remains committed to supporting those with sever behavioural problems and psychological symptoms of dementia.

Mr Kelly says he has heard nothing about future plans to replace the supplement that has been eliminated.

But he says most of those who received the supplement were legitimate. He points out there are 320,000 Australians with dementia now, and that number is expected to rise to 400,000 by 2021.

"Dementia is a chronic condition," he said.

"To think that you're going to pull money out of something that's been identified as a priority heath need and something that's intrinsic in the care of those older Australians, it's more than tragic. I think it's a travesty."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-26/dementia-supplement-payment-cut-after-budget-blow-out/5553394

[icyfroth]

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@bella_again wrote:

Federal Government cuts dementia and severe behaviours payment following budget blow-out

By social affairs correspondent Norman Hermant

Updated 2 hours 8 minutes ago

The Federal Government has cut the dementia and severe behaviours supplement, paid to providers of care for people with severe behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia.

Assistant Minister for Social Services Mitch Fifield has told the Senate the Government had no choice but to eliminate the supplement as of July 31, after its budget blew out by nearly 10 times over.

"I have not taken this decision lightly," Senator Fifield said.

"But there was no other responsible course of action in the circumstances."

The dementia and severe behaviours supplement is only a year old. It provides a payment of $16 a day for each eligible dementia patient in residential care homes.

Figures released by the Department of Social Services show demand for the payment has dramatically outstripped initial projections.

Original estimates indicated 2,000 people in residential care would be eligible. Instead, as of March, more than 25,000 people were receiving the supplement.

The budget for the payment expanded accordingly, from an initial estimate of $11.7 million to $110 million this year.

Loss will impact care, providers say

The peak body for not-for-profit residential care, Aged and Community Services Australia, says the number of those applying for the supplement should not have been a surprise.

"The Government, in creating this very necessary supplement, has grossly underestimated the number of people who should be eligible," the organisation's CEO John Kelly said.

He says losing the supplement will impact care.

"It enables my members across 1,800 facilities around Australia to provide extra support," he said.

"They may be able to put on a specialist, they may be able to put on a person with dementia training ...we're going to miss out on that."

But Alzheimer's Australia CEO Glen Rees says it was clear to his organisation that the supplement had gone off track.

He says the intent was good. The payment was designed to encourage residential care providers to provide more spaces for dementia sufferers with severe behavioural problems – some of the most difficult people to provide care for in Australia.

He says not long after the supplement was launched, it was clear there was a problem: there was no test to determine whether the providers who applied for the supplement could actually provide the appropriate care.

"From our point of view, it was always subject to error because the scheme wasn't accompanied by any definition of those providers likely to able to provide this most difficult level of care," Mr Rees said.

Result a 'travesty' for dementia sufferers

The result was far more recipients than anticipated, and a budget the Government says could reach $1.5 billion over the next 10 years.

Senator Fifield says it is the previous government, which launched the supplement, that should bear the blame.

"This is not a problem of the Government's making," Senator Fifield said.

"But it did fall to this Government to address the situation."

The Government says it remains committed to supporting those with sever behavioural problems and psychological symptoms of dementia.

Mr Kelly says he has heard nothing about future plans to replace the supplement that has been eliminated.

But he says most of those who received the supplement were legitimate. He points out there are 320,000 Australians with dementia now, and that number is expected to rise to 400,000 by 2021.

"Dementia is a chronic condition," he said.

"To think that you're going to pull money out of something that's been identified as a priority heath need and something that's intrinsic in the care of those older Australians, it's more than tragic. I think it's a travesty."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-26/dementia-supplement-payment-cut-after-budget-blow-out/5553394

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God what a load of codswallop!