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The Forum > Article Comments > More missed opportunities to improve infrastructure > Comments

More missed opportunities to improve infrastructure : Comments

By Chris Bowen, published 6/6/2005

Chris Bowen argues the Government must update the taxation system to encourage infrastructure investment.

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Chris Bowen asserts that the Future Fund is "a massive missed opportunity for infrastructure investment" but fails to explain how. It seems that the Fund will be free to invest responsibly in commercial infrastructure at the discretion of qualified independent trustees. The only “missed opportunity” then is for the monies in the fund to be directed to the sort of irresponsible infrastructure investments that politicians may prefer but the trustees reject. The sort of infrastructure that gets funded at such political discretion seems to range from the Alice Springs to Darwin railway, outback equine centres and unnecessary creek dredging. While these projects may be thought to do wonders for marginal vote buying, they have an unblemished record of destroying national wealth. Far better to pass up such opportunities. There is enough investment capital available to Australia to underwrite necessary economic infrastructure. It only requires Governments to get their act together in fettering the wealth limiting activities of their academic, market-sceptic, interventionist regulators and otherwise removing impediments to commercial investment.

But he is right about the tax law – the Labor Government’s retention of these deterrent provisions from 1983 to 1996 was reprehensible, but consistent with its own underlying hostility to private investment in public infrastructure. The failure of Coalition Governments to act since 1996 is only explicable in terms of its own suspicion of markets in this sector, a suspicion that is outdated but still clearly reflected in the attitudes of its authorities and regulators.
Posted by Engineer, Monday, 6 June 2005 11:14:35 AM
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Infrastructure is not the problem nor is taxation.

The problem is about unfettered immigration to satisfy the needs of the top 1-5% of plutocrats and politicians that rule NSW at the expense of the other 95% of citizens who have to suffer the secretly planned fall off in services designed to keep them in penury and submission.

The needs of ALL NSW citizens and in particular Sydney citizens need to be considered and this can only happen with a 5 year moratorium on immigration into Sydney. It can only happen if the Carr government is given a blood nose over its bull-at-a-gate 70,000 house expansion along Paramatta Rd. It can only take place if someone like Clover Morre who may be willing to provide a 5 year moratorium on immigration, is elected as Premier.

5 years should be enough to get 100% consensus rather than the current top heavy, plutocratic and corrupt 1-5% consensus. 5 years should be long enough to plan commensurate infrastructure, taxation and wealth sharing arrangements to allow very lucrative further immigration to proceed into Sydney in a fairer, shared, more decent and economically responsible manner.

Currently the Carr Government is acting as a de facto immigration centre at all cost to the community, where no care is taken, where no responsibility is accepted, where citizens are treated like enemies rather than intelligent individuals and where substantial profits are safely squirrelled away for after they are voted out of office and move to sunnier, ungridlocked and secure havens.

In elite Sydney circles it is a question of: You don't think this is a democracy do you? And you really don't think we want to live here with all those bloody foreigners we are building ghettos for? We don't want to be stuck in gridlocked traffic and trying to rip each other's heads off.
We are just the architects of all this: we are the plutopulationists, you know, the plutocrats who profit from building unsustainable populations. You really don't think we are going to live in this bloody mess
Posted by KAEP, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 8:33:50 PM
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