The income-tax-free club now covers 42.2 per cent of the nation’s 9.754 million families. But middle earners just outside the tax-free zone are caught in a new personal tax pincer, with 134,000 breadwinners being pushed up the scales from 30c to 40c despite Labor claiming it would “increase the take-home pay of all taxpayers”.
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees says rumours that a leopard inhabits bushland on Sydney’s outskirts cannot be dismissed, because the safety of children could be at risk.
Some Liberal MPs this week pointed to Labor’s Crean leadership experience and say they just wanted to “end the agony”. Some who changed their support from the original safe option of Brendan Nelson as leader said they did so at the last minute because they realised a vote in his favour now would only be tested again in a month or two.
No industrial-scale integrated carbon capture projects yet exist, intensifying debate over whether it is too uncertain and far in the future to answer the immediate threat of climate change. But Mr Rudd said he saw opportunities in mining and energy areas from Queensland to Victoria to introduce the technology.
The Prime Minister will unveil a strategy to put Australia at the forefront of the technology, which captures emissions from coal-fired power plants and permanently stores them deep underground. The critical importance of carbon capture and storage to Australia’s climate change response has become increasingly evident.
The $12 billion North West Metro is not expected to survive in its current form, and four big Rail Clearways projects worth $1 billion, promised by the New South Wales Government but not yet built, are also at risk. It is also possible the Government might defer the $1.37 billion South West Rail Link from Glenfield to Leppington.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has accused Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull of irresponsibility for contradicting the Reserve Bank governor about the financial crisis. Mr Turnbull today appeared to criticise Glenn Stevens’s choice of the words when describing Australian banks’ position in relation to troubled overseas institutions.
Coming almost 10 months after the Labor Party was swept to power on a promise to tear up the WorkChoices laws, the Workplace Relations Minister’s speech fleshing out the details of the Rudd Government’s replacement industrial relations regime was met with anger from unions, particularly over the revised unfair-dismissal rules.
In a speech today titled ‘Introducing Australia’s New Workplace Relations System’, Julia Gillard threw down the gauntlet to the Coalition, arguing the Rudd Government had a mandate to introduce the next wave of legislation to end the previous Work Choices regime.
Research by Catholic Health Australia estimates the greenhouse footprint of each of the nation’s 83,000 hospital beds is about 28 tonnes a year - double the emissions from an average household. When combined with the emissions from aged care services, the health sector accounts for about five million tonnes of CO2 a year.