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From: Charles
Remote Name: 63.34.196.111
Remote User:
Date: 25 Jul 2001
Time: 08:00 -0500
While we were taking pictures of the harbor lights after supper, a girl asked us where we were from. She's from North Carolina now, but had been down since 7/10 to visit her mother, originally from Sydney and now back after spending 20 years in the US. When her mom walked up a minute later she was able to shed some light on questions we had about some of the taxes we've seen mentioned.
It seems Australia is heavily influenced by labor unions (the Labor party is more than just the name attached to one of the political groups...it really does look after labor). Anyway, according to this lady (and I may be simplifying a little) because of the union influence, most non-professional workers in Australia are on some sort of nationwide wage scale called the award system. It dictates your basic pay as well as what you are paid for work in excess of 8 hours a day and 40 hours per week. There are penalties and surcharges associated with overtime (we'd seen a sign yesterday mentioning a 10% surcharge on food sold between midnight and 6AM because of State Awrd penalties). Australia has a personal income tax that was recently lowered from 38% to 30%; HOWEVER, if you hold 2 jobs, earnings from the second job are taxed at a rate she said was 48%. There is no Social Security tax though.
In the last couple of years, Australia implemented a national sales tax called the GST (Goods and services tax) which covers pretty much everything. It has a 10% rate and apparently has generated huge amounts of revenue. Consequently, there is now some more talk about dropping the income tax rates some more. Of course, in implementing the GST, prices were raised as well. The GST is a built in tax, so you don't really see it unless you are looking for it. Having only been back from the US for a little while, this lady was very skeptical about how it was all really working. What she had noticed, though, was that transit fees had been raised 4 times in the last year and everyone does complain about high costs. I don't don't know how all this plays into the weak Australian dollar, but there may well be a connection.
From: Canada
Remote Name: cpe-24-209-234-230.cinci.res.rr.com
Remote User:
Date: 22 Jun 2007
Time: 00:08 -0500
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