Mainstream media fails to mention positive Labor policies
The new year in Australian politics, an all-important election year, began on a high with a host of initiatives taking effect from January 1, 2025.
Among these, and there are many, are pay rises of up to 13 per cent for aged care workers, an increase in the Medicare safety net threshold, multinational corporation anti-tax evasion laws, mandatory climate reporting for businesses, new vehicle emission standards, and the criminalisation of wage underpayment as wage theft, just to mention a few, all of them opposed by Peter Dutton and the Coalition.
These reforms, which come into effect this year, are just the most recent in a broader set of policy initiatives for which the government has received too little credit, if any, and which seem strangely invisible to the ‘objective’ media eye.
These include the introduction of Medicare bulk-billing urgent care clinics, the largest minimum wage increase in over a decade, cheaper prescription medicines, paid domestic violence leave, expanded childcare, making banks and social media companies responsible for scams which have cost vulnerable people thousands of dollars, protections for gig economy workers, reducing inflation from over 6 per cent to 2.8 per cent, and finishing the NBN with fibre to the premises, instead of Malcolm Turnbull’s old copper wire disaster.
Corporate tax evasion
One of the most significant of this raft of new laws that came into effect this month is the Albanese government’s landmark transparency measures to combat multinational corporate tax evasion.
Described by the UK Financial Times as ‘one of the world’s strictest tax disclosure laws’, these new financial transparency laws are projected to yield Australia billions of dollars in additional revenue from previously lost profits, overturning decades of corporate failure to pay taxes. Who knew?!
The Centre for International Corporate Accountability & Research (CICAR) hailed the transparency laws as setting ‘a new bar’ in curbing multinational tax evasion.
Stolen by corporates
They said the Albanese government showed ‘real leadership by standing up to huge pressure from........
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