"While I'm unaware of any equivalent study in Australia".

Penny to a pound there is no such report. Australians are just not interested in much beyond sport and self-gratification. If you want to learn anything, you have to read the Brits and the Americans.

I left high school the day I turned fifteen. Because I was old enough to work and contribute to the household budget! And after attending more than thirteen schools in ten years. The longest stint in just one being around three years and where the sharing of essential textbooks meant some of us missed out on foundational subjects.

I like many others found that the best income was in seasonal work and chasing it all over the countryside. Where layoffs were the order of the day with the end of the contract!

Rules are for fools and this article was all too obviously written, self evidently, by one?

Or some smart-ass self-satisfied privileged fat cat? Who probably would be killed by a single day of harvesting baled lucerne hay by hand. Common enough when I was in my twenties.

I also attended night school so I could make myself more employable and graduate. And burnt the midnight oil on my tertiary education and qualifications.

The (half-assed) formula didn't apply to me, nor the families of itinerant workers Nor those born in our numerous postcode poverty traps! (40%)

Nor is it easy to sell up, and move to where the work is. Given the willful destruction via official government policy of the family farm or affordable housing.

This is just more mindless blame the victim(or anybody else) stuff to cover for the fact that places like S.A., has unemployment rates at near great depression levels.

And while the government, our recalcitrant intransigent government focuses on mad hatter tax policies and shrinking the social welfare bill! Plus, nonsensical divide and rule garbage!? Same old, same old reelection strategies?

We need a different formula and A GOVERNMENT THAT TAKES FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ECONOMY AND SUBSEQUENT SOCIOECONOMIC OUTCOMES!
TBC, Alan B.

Continued: We need a brand new paradigm/rules of the "game" or if you will, a "new deal" fit for the 21st century!

One where logic's rites are the guiding principle, rather than insanity personified in our taxation, housing and energy policies.

We need to refocus on Australia and Australians first and foremost and never ever of a plethora of debt-laden, tax-avoiding, price gouging, carpetbagging foreigners!

We have a two and a half trillion dollar super fund! And if invested here, would entirely negate the claimed need for foreign investors/foreign control and surrendered economic sovereignty!

And starts with genuine tax reform, not the CLAYTON'S VARIETY on offer!

Given the top tax paid after deductions by any corporation, year ending 2017, was just 13 % coupled to unavoidable tax compliance costs of around 7%, Making the total tax and tax-related bill, some 20% for those who paid their legal tax?

Given an unavoidable, free of any deductions, flat tax of 15%! Would increase the actual revenue base by no less than 2% and force those who pay no tax? About one-third of multinational corporations? To finally pay their fair share and abiding by our rules!

We'd be able to return to a balanced budget far sooner! And while simultaneously shaving around 5% off the total tax related tax bill For those who pay their fair share! And compel the avoiders to pay in full and fair measure!
TBC, Alan B.

We need rules-based electricity supply and far more competition Rather than a few privatized or corporatized price gouging, foreign-controlled monopolies handed a virtual captive market?

Due to moribund energy policies and lack of a rational rationale and fair dinkum, free-market competition!

And starts and ends, by lifting the nonsense bans on for peaceful purpose, dispatchable nuclear power!

All free-market capitalism comes with attendant risk! Some of it sovereign risk for the unwise investor, who should not be protected by the taxpaying consumer, for the results o their own stupidity!

Allow/encourage/facilitate and fund cooperative capitalism and allow it to invest in and operate nuclear power stations, i.e. MSR thorium in completely unfettered competition and power prices to the industrial consumer could be below 2 cents per KwH.

Some of which could be directed at deionisation dialysis desalination and some quite massive, dryland irrigation projects!

We just need some comprehensible rules and allow free market capitalism, i.e., government facilitated and financed co-ops to get started. Then stand back and let her rip!

And if those two new rules based paradigms then encourage all the high tech energy dependant manufacturing to relocate here along with a veritable tidal wave of fully cashed up self-funded retirees to relocate here? Where're the negatives in that!?

Or alternatively, sit on your hands while drought and financial disaster slams the land and we return to the spectre, of four farmers a week committing suicide? Only exceeded by the rate of the new homeless?

Without question the product of Government inaction and or indifference!?
Alan B.

The rules of the game?

Our tax collection system may well qualify as a game, given the cheating that invariably marks it? With the latest gambit, the lowering of the official rate, from 35%? to 25%?

Those who paid the top rate after deductions, or 13 cents in the dollar? Will be able, given deductions, lower their actual tax paid. To just 3 cents in the dollar?

Is bracket creep/mortgaging our children's future incomes, the only strategy the government has to balance the budget/create a surplus?

The only method that kills bracket creep stone dead is a flat tax coupled to sliding scale ceilings at the bottom and all brackets. Adjusted upwards in line with inflation! Leaving future governments no other choice, than grow the economy to increase internal revenue! That's what they're there for!

And could start with sane energy and genuinely reformed taxation that instead of driving our manufacturing sector elsewhere! Incentivize them to return ASAP!

An entirely unavoidable flat tax of 15% that has no deductions fastened to it. Will raise more tax than currently collected. And with no tax compliance costs, in play.

Allows the cost of tax compliance (7% av.) to be returned to the bottom line!

Compare these relevant numbers, 13% paid as the actual top tax paid in honest to goodness dollars. Plus unavoidable compliance costs of around 7%. Or if you will, a total tax related impost on the bottom line of 20%.

Or 5% more than they'd have to pay if the going unavoidable rate were 15% of all income or profit?

15% still more money (2%) than the 13%, the top tax paid, actually accumulating in government coffers 2017!

That's 15% minus the former obligatory tax compliance costs and an effective tax rate of just 8% for business and PAYG self employed or 4% less than the current lowest rate for PAYE workers.

Along with consequent massively reduced time-consuming paperwork!

An economy-boosting win/win all round except for redundant former tax practitioners, who are not owed a free lunch or an entirely unproductive income!
Alan B.