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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Did you ready the article? McBride initially posted on his personal blog, which caught the attention of ABC journalist Dan Oakes. The information was leaked to Oakes and the ABC from there.

    My reading of the article was McBride didn’t initially think there were war crimes committed but:

    ADF leadership alleg(ed) that SAS soldiers were being wrongly accused and illegally investigated for war crimes.

    “If there is political bullshit going on against soldiers, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re SAS or not, you need to stand up for it,”

    McBride didn’t think war crimes had happened which is why he asserts that the soldiers were being wrongly accused and investigated. Oakes disagreed.

    Now the question is, why is Oakes making this allegation allegation against McBride if it’s not true?










  • What’s the difference between “respect their culture” and “Federation of tribes and culture”. Either you take the view that “respect their culture” means allowing people to retain and freely exercise their culture in public, e.g. speaking their language and celebrating their cultural events publicly, in which case it’s really indistinguishable to a federation of cultures. The alternative view is, people can only speak English and practice English cultural things in public, in which case is that really “respecting their culture”?

    I suspect Howard is dog-whistling the latter, because Australia is doing the former, and it certainly doesn’t sound like he’s supportive of that, otherwise why would be have so much trouble with it?







  • Completely agree. That property value grows over time in a fixed area is natural behaviour, as an area develops, density grows and demand increases. But that growth is not necessarily “productive”. The only time that value is productive is if it incentivises redevelopment into higher density dwellings to meet the demand in that area. However this has been perverted into property owners who have paid off their property to just sit on the valuable land and reap the capital gains.

    Capital gains from land value really needs to be taxed in a special way as you suggest. I would propose two approaches:

    • Adding land tax (and abolishing stamp duty on property) that’s not based on your property value but on the value of a property you’re on (so high density apartments would end up with minimal land tax

    • increasing capital gains from land tax by either having a progressive taxation rate on capital gains due to land value (which would ignore increase property value from renovations etc) or capping it entirely (so gains above that are taxed at 100%).