Tony Abbott must be crazy.

I have spoken to enough members of his cabinet to know that Tony Abbott did not have cabinet endorsement of his crazy parental leave scheme.

Tony Abbott has just announced a new Great Big Tax.

A Great Big Tax on you which you’ll pay through higher prices or through reduced returns from your superannuation fund.

It’s a $2.7 billion Great Big Tax.   It will cost Australia’s productive economy heaps.   It’s an extra 1.7% in tax on all income in excess of $5M for companies.

And as far as I can see the scheme has no friends anywhere.

Mr Abbott says he will levy the Great Big Tax so that he can hand out up to $75,000 to parents of new babies.   Payments so they can stay at home with the baby on full pay for 6 months.

He has announced it as a policy without the backing of his cabinet.   I have spoken to several of them – they knew nothing and were privately shocked by the announcement.

Just weeks ago Mr Abbott promised the Australian people that there would be no new taxes and no increased taxes to fund his election promises.

This has traces of the madness of Malcolm Turnbull about it.

Nothing for stay at home mums.

This will hit jobs.   It will hurt your superannuation fund return, with 1.7% less in company profits.  

When did Mr Abbott decide that it was the role of Government to decide winners and losers in the economy?   Why should my superannuation fund pay for someone else’s baby?

Just a few weeks ago it was no new taxes.   5 weeks later this mega-tax on the productive bits of the economy.   Madness.

I care about Australia and how she is viewed overseas.

There are some amongst us who seem hell-bent on painting Australia as racist.

This is the Sky News report on Friday after the tragic death of the little Indian boy Gurshan Singh was found dumped near Melbourne airport. - View Link here

Race is immediately an issue as far as Sky News in the United Kingdom is concerned.

It’s also an issue for Sunny Chandra, an “Indian Community Leader” in Australia.

Well over the weekend Gursewak Dhillon, 23, faced an out-of-sessions court hearing before a bail justice at the St Kilda Road police complex charged with the manslaughter of little Gurshan.

The bail hearing was told that Dhillon lived in the same house as the little boy.   It heard he is a part-time taxi driver who just bought a small truck and was due to start full-time work with a courier company on Wednesday, lives in Lalor with his wife.

Det Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles said police opposed bail because Dhillon had few ties to Australia and was under investigation by immigration officials over allegations his passport may be false.

He has a daughter in his native India.

So an Indian national has been charged with the murder of the little Indian boy.   But that hasn’t stopped the BBC from continuing to report the Australian racist angle to this story.

The BBC’s online web service is one of the world’s most visited news sites.   Its own blurb says “BBC.com has 26 million captivated unique users every month. They are the conscientious consumers, big spenders and opinion leaders populating the online world.” - View article here

The BBC’s report is replete with phrases like “There have been a number of racist attacks on Indians in the past year” “His death came as Australia was making efforts to improve relations with India, a major export market, after a series of alleged race attacks” and “Last month, thousands of Australians visited Indian restaurants for a Vindaloos Against Violence campaign”.

The headline half way through the BBC’s story is Racism charges.

And this report from the BBC comes after the news that an Indian national has been charged with the manslaughter.

You have to wonder if there’s some sort of campaign to make Australians out to be racists.

The Financial Review newspaper has a great editorial today.

It says Anna Bligh is doing her best to damage the Labor Party’s brand in Queensland.  To show that under Anna Bligh, Labor cannot be trusted.

The Fin Review is talking about the land tax amendment that the Bligh Government is using to overturn a High Court ruling on land tax.

The Land Tax act has stayed the same since 1944.

Land Tax and rates are based on the simple value of the land without buildings or anything else.   Just the land.

The Beattie/Bligh Government slugged the owners of Pacific Fair shopping centre with tax based on a $200 million valuation of the land.   The owners went to court and said the government’s valuation was dodgy, the real value was closer to $40 million.   The government had taken into account things that the law didn’t allow them to consider.   They’d tried it on.

The High Court said the Bligh Government was breaking the law.   As the Fin Review says, rather than repenting their crime, rather than showing remorse, state treasurer Andrew Fraser and the natural resources minister Stephen Robertson have reached for a legislative baseball bat to bludgeon the court and property owners into submission.

Retrospective laws, in this case reaching back 8 years, are a direct attack on the rule of law.   Liberal democracies rely on the rule of law.   It’s like saying the speeding fine you received in 2002 was insufficient, the government needs more money, the fine’s been doubled.

The Bligh Government’s rubbish new law doesn’t even make sense in English.   It tries to put into law the fiction that the “unimproved” value of the land includes the value of leases, goodwill and profits.

It’s an abuse of state power.   As the Fin says, the minister’s defence – “we need the money” – is a variant of excuses heard in criminal please in courts every day of the week.

The government claims that $1 billion is at stake but as you’ve heard on my program, the real number is a fraction of that.   The Fin Review says the lameness of the defence is compounded by the fact that they’ve managed their economy about as badly as any state government and are the authors of their own fiscal predicament.

It’s immoral and unprincipled.   The Queensland Government would do well to recall the debacle of the NSW property vendor’s tax and think about the damage their ill-conceived measure could to revenues in the medium term.

The Fin Review says “there could be few better illustrations of the bungling maladministration of state taxes…. than the Bligh Government’s Valuation of Land and Other Legislation Amendment Bill.   The Bligh Government should press delete and start again.”  

And the Minister of the Crown responsible for this debacle is the same hapless individual who brought you Queensland Health’s culture change.   It’s time to go, Stephen Robertson.

Yesterday I received a note from a listener that said,

“What does the water commission do?”

I didn’t really know so I thought I’d find out.

I know what they don’t do.

They don’t build things.

They don’t run things.

They don’t make things – unless you include brochures and ads.

The Commission’s role is to ensure sustainable water supplies by developing long term water supply strategies, establishing a regional water grid, implementing water restrictions, managing water demand, providing advice to government and reforming the water industry.  View link here

The Commission is currently developing a long term strategy to guide the region’s water initiatives in conjunction with State and local governments.

They give out a lot of advice which must be nice.   They work-together with a lot of people.   And they are very strategic which is apparently quite a good thing to be.

They spent $25.4 million in 2008, including $3.7 million to establish an SEQ water grid manager.   The water grid apparently doesn’t pump water from fuller dams into emptier ones; the water grid is designed to pump recycled sewerage from the sewers and treatment plants into the dams.

So – the Water Commssion had 77 employees in 2008 and exactly the same number of employees – 77 – in 2009.

But their salary bill!!!   In 2008 they spent $7.162M in payments to their employees.   In just one year, that bill went up to $9.45M!   A 39% increase in just one year!    Happy Days.

That’s an average pay packet of $123,000 for each employee!

And they run nothing.

We need your help.

What real jobs could those 77 people do to deliver real value to the community?

How about the edges at your place?   Maybe they could take in some ironing?  Got any other suggestions?

Last Friday, the Full Court of the Federal Court dismissed an action by the Commonwealth to strike-out a claim made by Mamdough Habib against the Commonwealth.   Habib wants the Commonwealth to compensate him for injuries suffered during his alleged torture in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

The Commonwealth contended that the Federal Court could not hear Mr Habib's claim because it would require the court to determine the lawfulness of the acts of foreign officials within the territories of foreign states, contrary to the 'act of state doctrine'.

The “act of state doctrine” generally provides:
• that every sovereign State is bound to respect the independence of every other sovereign State, and
• the courts of one country will not sit in judgment on the acts of the government of another, done within its own territory.

Keep in mind it was the Australian Government that was arguing that the “act of state doctrine” applied.   The Government clearly believes it’s important that our courts and legal system don’t interfere in the legal systems of other sovereign states.

So how does that sit with the executive government in Queensland, politicians like Anna Bligh and Cameron Dick and their decision to withhold evidence from authorities in the US state of Alabama?

Justice and politics don’t mix.