Road genocide
There's a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots in our society, and you don't have to look much further than the family car.
While many low-income families get around in 20-year-old Fords or Holdens, the well-heeled are purchasing brand new four-wheel drives. Many of these are equipped, in the name of safety, with hefty bullbars.
While the rich get around the cities in their all-terrain vehicles, which only they can afford to buy and maintain, the rest of us in our lower-to-the-ground hatchbacks, sedans and station wagons are prey. We shiver in their sights due to the danger they pose (and, in the case of many low-income families, a lack of car heating).
Research recently revealed in Royal Auto examines the impact of similarly weighted vehicles without bullbars in a side-on crash. It found that the test dummy in the "sedan into a sedan" crash test would have survived without serious injury, while in the "four-wheel drive into a sedan" crash it would have received serious or fatal injuries.
If, due to their threat to other drivers, four-wheel drivers were much more heavily burdened in areas of registration and stamp duty, this would ensure that those buying off-road vehicles actually have need for one, rather than just to pose in the cities at the rest of our peril.
There should, of course, be some concessions for those in rural localities, as that is where there is an obvious need for such a vehicle.
The weekend is commonly when these accidents occur as the well off travel out of their inner suburbs on what may be a ski trip, a winery tour or holiday-home trip, passing through the outlying suburbs occupied by the poor. When the classes mingle like this and accidents happen, the differences in earning capacity become clear.
Perhaps the extra money raised from higher registration fees for four-wheel drives could go to a fund for people injured by these monster cars?
[Abridged.]
Electoral alliances
While I am enthralled with the success of the London Socialist Alliance in bringing so many British left groups together on the one ticket I feel compelled to ask the question, why couldn't it happen here?
If an electoral alliance of left forces can be established in London among the notoriously sectarian English left, and in Scotland before that with the Scottish Socialist Alliance, what factors are missing from the Australian situation that precludes replication? We even share the same franchises here.
I ask these questions because the Democratic Socialist Party has been advocating electoral alliances for more than a decade. The DSP in fact was the major impetus for the most successful experiment in this regard here — that of the Green Alliance for the 1991 Brisbane City Council elections.
So what's missing? If electoral alliance politics can work so well in Scotland during the 1990s, in London now and in Brisbane in 1991 what's holding us back?
Anyone who is at all familiar with electoral regulations in this country should know that it is becoming more difficult for minor parties to field candidates. By combining forces we begin to deal with these practicalities while finding common political ground.
With the notorious success of One Nation to point to, no one can say it won't work. It did on the far right, remember, by the simple fact of opening the process up to all comers and by excluding no one.
There's surely a message there.
Brisbane
Labor on super
Simon Crean (Press Club speech, May 17) has suggested that Labor may lift superannuation contributions whilst maintaining superannuation tax concessions.
What we should be doing is scrapping the tax concessions, turning the compulsory private superannuation levy into a tax, and boosting the age pension.
Superannuation tax concessions favour high-income recipients and mandatory private superannuation accounts do nothing to offset this inequity.
If the superannuation levy went to the government it could buy shares in, and lend to, private companies — and, best of all, invest in public enterprises. The profits and interest thereby generated could finance higher age pensions, public health care for the elderly and other government spending.
People wanting more than the state would supply in retirement would then save privately with neither state direction nor subsidy.
Why does Labor prefer to extend an inequitable private retirement income scheme when a fairer public sector-based model is available?
Rydalmere NSW
GST claims
How wondrous the workings of our federal government?
Take their claim that "everyone will be better off under the GST". But how can this be when the same, and usually more, tax has to be obtained one way or another to run the country, as well as pay their own ever-increasing perks?
And how better-off will the million small shopkeepers be, or the myriad tradesmen, taxi drivers or farmers — all having to cop heavy compliance costs and work harder as unpaid tax collectors for the government?
"Oh but you'll pay less income tax", they trumpet, but how near will this compensate for the universal GST price increases on goods and services? And how many of the million-plus unemployed, young people working for the dole, housewives, low-hour casuals, or heavy indebted farmers will benefit, since their minuscule incomes attract little or no tax anyway?
Then on budget night our smiling treasurer congratulates himself with a whole raft of hand-outs, noticeably many not for the budget year under review, but for four years hence, so that, for example, of the $1.8 billion for medical services in the country, only $185 million will be provided for in the current year, with the remaining three years obviously dependent on the budgetary restraints in each of those three years. Similarly others.
So how can we plebs be expected to go along with snake-oil pronouncements like these?
Ken O'Hara
Gerringong NSW