Federal Budget 2009-10 (1 Viewer)

Lentern

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You are a deadset fucking nong. If you can move everyone in the population over to 30% subsidised private health cover you're still halving government expenditure on health while providing better health cover for all than you could with double that money.

There are other roads to universal health care than socialised medicine you despicable trotskyite.
There are other roads, there are not better or fairer roads.
 

whatashotbyseve

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It's a smart prospective tax increase. If smokers accept it, the government gains additional revenue. If smokers refuse it, and thus smoke less or quit smoking, then the health related costs of smoking diminishes.
 

Woteva636

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go liberal, increase cigarette tax and getus back in the black faster.

btw, who reckons rudd'll call a double disollution election, or what ever its technical term is, if he cant get the buget through the senate?
 

Tonthat

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go liberal, increase cigarette tax and getus back in the black faster.

btw, who reckons rudd'll call a double disollution election, or what ever its technical term is, if he cant get the buget through the senate?
It would be a good move politically.
 

withoutaface

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There's lots of proceed foods that are healthy though. Plus a 10% difference isn't even vaguely comparable to the huge taxes on cigarettes and alcohol.

You know the real solution is to privatize health care. What the Liberals are doing is populist nonsense. They are statist thugs, just like Labor.
I do know this. I believe though that bumping up the price of smokes is the lesser of two evils.
 

S.H.O.D.A.N.

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Look I agree that if we must have socialised health care, it makes sense to tax things like cigarettes. But the tax is already so high, and smokers pay much higher premiums for private health cover. So smokers with private health insurance are getting slugged massively.
Australia's cigarette tax is one of the lower in the Western world. Too low. And why exactly is slugging smokers even more a bad thing? It's one of the worst drugs around. Tax the shit out of the mother fucker, maybe get some people to quit, and possibly even make a little government revenue on the side.

I don't buy Spiny's lame excuse that "only poor people smoke so it hits poor people". Well maybe this way it'd be too expensive for them to smoke. Yay.
 

SnowFox

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Why do motorbikes pay lower registration fees when motorcyclists are 30 times more likely to be killed or seriously injured on the roads than people driving cars?
If your not a twat, you wont get hit whilst riding a motorcycle.

As for the lower rego, im pretty sure thats for the amount of abuse roads take from the vehicle.

Makes sense that Truck Rego>Car Rego> MotorCycle Rego>.
 

spiny norman

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Australia's cigarette tax is one of the lower in the Western world. Too low. And why exactly is slugging smokers even more a bad thing? It's one of the worst drugs around. Tax the shit out of the mother fucker, maybe get some people to quit, and possibly even make a little government revenue on the side.
The prevalence of smoking tobacco in Australia is lower than in most other countries, developed and not, so it's not like it shows it to have any notable effect. Instead, Australia's no smoking campaign is amongst the most effective in the world. That's how to combat smoking, not through some populist measure which you can point at and say "Look, I'm doing something" without really putting any effort into it. We're winning the war on cigarette smoking in this country (I don't know the exact current figure, but less than 25% of Australians smoke), it's becoming a less socially acceptable thing to do, punishing smokers financially is not the way to solve the problem.

I don't buy Spiny's lame excuse that "only poor people smoke so it hits poor people". Well maybe this way it'd be too expensive for them to smoke. Yay.
I didn't say only the poor smoke, but smoking is a habit that the lower classes disproportionately partake in. If you don't buy that, then I recommend asking any year 8 PDHPE student. Likewise they're more likely to do heroin (an even worse drug than tobacco, "one of the worst around") - if every heroin dealer hiked their prices by 15% it wouldn't lead to heroin addicts quitting. Likewise smoking. Its problem is that it's addictive, most people recognise that addiction is an illness; how you can claim that the ill should be subjected to a tax hike is beyond me.
 

S.H.O.D.A.N.

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Sorry, but you Libertarians lose my support when you go around trying to tout the virtues of heroine.

Honestly, you guys have no clue how to explain your agenda to the common man. Perhaps it's simply too extreme for that to even be possible.
 

Will Shakespear

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The problem is every external force (i.e. the US and other armies) is itself created by force. The people who funded these armies did not choose to do so. The money was simply stolen from them.
there's plenty of pro war rednecks in the USA...
 

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