This was sent to me via email, thought Id share. Is supporting the car industry so expensive, compared to our heavily subsidised lives? AUTHOR: Remy Davison Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University Remy Davisons Chair is funded by the EU Commission. The government’s handling of the automotive industry underestimates its potential strategic importance to the Australian economy. AAP You. Are. Subsidised. Think this $18-per-capita car subsidy is too much? Think again. You — yes, you — subsidise the banks to the tune of $763 per annum, plus all the fees and charges they generously impose upon you. Not quite the chunk of change ($83 billion) the US government affords its banks in subsidies, but still. And the mining industry doesn’t have clean hands either. They get at least $4 billion per annum. Queensland alone spends $1.4 billion in subsidies. Let’s be clear about this: virtually every industry in Australia is subsidised, directly or indirectly, via government hand-outs. We’ll try a little quiz first. Tick any box that applies to you: Your child care. Your private (and public) health insurance. Your wheat. (The Australian Wheat Board runs a single desk that avoids a genuinely free market in wheat export sales. And does deals with the late-lamented Saddam, occasionally.) Your private schools. Your universities. Your accountant. Your private-sector big law firm, which would require oxygen if starved of government contracts. A Victorian government-commissioned report (by Boston Consulting) notes that, “up until now the provision of legal services has largely been an unsupervised feeding trough for law firms.” (It’s now a supervised feeding trough.) Your National Broadband Network. (My telecoms engineering friends are still giggling with delight at the mere thought of the NBN and have all ordered new 7-Series BMWs.) Your first home. Your nursing home. Your negative gearing. Your ABC. My salary. Your salary. Your superannuation tax breaks. Actors and the arts in general (don’t me get started; I’ll end up sounding like Jack Hibberd). Corporate welfare. Don’t kid yourself if you’re in business. Tax breaks infiltrate every part of the scaly Australian subsidy serpent. Virtually every business input is tax deductible. For example, that “company” car you drive around at weekends? The “home office” with a chunk of the domestic mortgage on it as a business expense? If you’re not doing this, then you’re paying far too much tax. True, sectors like dairy have very low subsidies (the second-lowest in the world). But don’t make the mistake of thinking you didn’t pay for dairy industry rationalisation: you did. From 1995, under the National Competition Policy (NCP), taxpayers funded billions in rationalisation across a range of industry sectors. One of the objectives of the NCP was to drive Queensland dairy farmers off the land, compensate them with a fistful of dollars, and hand the dairy industry over to Victorian dairy farmers, who then have their teats sucked dry as the supermarkets screw them on milk prices to the point of bankruptcy. Good to see the ACCC doing such a fine job regulating predatory behaviour. Unless you have no children, live in a cave, avoid Weet-Bix, The Marriage of Figaro, and Dimboola, while consuming only dairy products, You. Are. Subsidised.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 23:22:25 +0000
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