Just as well the Commonwealth Government Budget wasn’t tabled last week – that would have been too much of a mixed message. A nation’s budget is all about redistribution of wealth, a concept worth keeping in mind at a time when £100 million of British taxpayers’ money was spent on an unnecessary coronation pageant. As has been repeatedly pointed out, Prince Charles became King by default on September 8, 2022, on the death of his…
I just happened to be reading a novel set in the Edwardian era at the same time as the media was going bonkers (again) about the Reserve Bank raising interest rates by 0.25% to 3.6%. In Louis de Bernieres’s* book, The Dust That Falls from Dreams, one of the characters is holding forth about the sudden rise in the bank rate and subsequent collapse of the share market in 1914. Hamilton McCosh, a daring entrepreneur…
Australians have been hoarding cash, particularly through the first year of Covid-19, despite forecasts that we will be a 98% cashless society by 2024. Even if this prediction from global payments giant FIS comes to pass, some 540,000 Australians will still prefer to use cash. You may recall a flurry of news stories on this topic in March. The research commented on the effect of a de facto ban on cash during the first year…
I might not have thought about this tax topic had not a reader emailed to gently remind me that Barnaby Joyce is not a farmer, as I said last week, but an accountant. I could be forgiven for being lured in to that way of thinking by the way Barnaby portrays himself to the electorate. He loves a photo opportunity down on the farm, wearing the big hat and looking suitably weather-beaten. Barnaby does come…