Your editor certainly has taken a pasting this year from bloggers who accuse us of scare-mongering over our “Government wants to steal your Super” commentary.
Here’s a sample of the posts to the Money Morning and Daily Reckoning websites. First off, a post railing against last week’s effort:
“Passing legislation in Australia takes at the minimum a month of two, from the initial bill to formal implementation, and if the government even mentioned proposals to confiscate individual super assets the result would be obvious. Every SMSF would sell its assets immediately, the ASX would crash immediately, and thirdly all money from the sales would leave Australia asap. And all this would happen while the legislation was still being discussed. Sayce’s article is paranoid nonsense.” – Ken, Daily Reckoning Website
Then there was this comment following an article we wrote on “Super Theft” back in May:
“Are you crazy? How do you justify a jump from the Govt recouping money from Super funds that is unclaimed by temporary workers a little faster than previously to them taking ALL Australian’s Superannuation? I cannot believe you are a fully-qualified advisor (assuming you are) and hold those views. I guess not all financial advisors are equal.” – Russ, Daily Reckoning website
Or this, commenting on the same article:
“Your logic is one of the more courageous leaps I have witnessed for some time. While your sentiment is appreciated your argument has a fatal flaw. This is still a relatively well functioning democracy and with so many voters having a stake in this system expropriation is still a fraught strategy for incumbent Governments. It can only occur in Argentina and Venezuela because they are affectively one-party states. I expect a more subtle approach will be more likely i.e. greater tolerance for inflation” – DG, Daily Reckoning website
And finally this one:
“Is this article some sort of experiment to determine the gullibility of readers of the Daily Reckoning. Will there be another article pointing us to a safe haven investment for our super where it is kept safe from the government? Maybe somebody will be able to suggest something that will keep it safe from us as well.” – Charfcutter, Daily Reckoning website
Of course, there were posts agreeing with our position as well. But we prefer to point out the ones that disagreed.
Well, it looks as though while we were tapping away on these thoughts and you were either reading them or ignoring them, the cheeky scamps in government have already been drying the ink on the next phase of the Super Theft campaign.
Don’t worry about the Henry or Cooper reviews, when you’re in government it seems you can get away with almost anything you like.
And what better cover than the Copenhagen conference – isn’t that playing out beautifully for the politicians? Headlines about the conference being in disarray and a stalemate, “Oh no, the world will end if we don’t do something!”
Then just in the nick of time, the world leaders arrive. What are the odds on a ‘solution’ being found and leaders being hailed as heroes? The odds are unbackable, just make sure you’ve put enough money away to pay for it when the bill arrives.
Anyway, no mainstream journalist is going to bother themselves covering government thievery and deceit while there’s a brawl happening in Denmark.
Internet Censorship policy is a perfect example. Bring that old chestnut out while no-one’s looking.
You’d think the press would be up in arms over a potential threat to press and individual freedom. But no, the best the lame saps at the Australian Financial Review and The Age can do is to consign the story to the technology sections of the paper.
If you think that’s as far as the government will go with Internet censorship, think again. Because it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Once a government gets its foot in the door on one issue, it calls in the heavies and before you know it the whole front door is barged down and government is camped out in your lounge room bossing you around, telling you what to do, and ordering you to hand over more cash otherwise they’ll beat the ‘carp’ out of you.
And that’s exactly what’s happening with Super Theft.
Earlier this year we warned the first tip of the iceberg was the theft of foreign temporary worker superannuation. This was the one where if foreigners who had accumulated Super subsequently left Australia, the super fund would be required to send those balances to the Australian Tax Office.
In effect, foreign temporary workers would be subject to a 100% tax on their superannuation if they left it here.
How about that, a 100% tax on a 9% tax. You can’t beat that for ingenuity.
What would happen to the money? That’s the best part – from the government’s perspective – because it goes straight to Consolidated Revenue. In other words, straight to the Federal Government’s bank account so it can spend it on useless trinkets like free home insulation and “Climate Change” solutions.
That little bit of thievery was estimated to add around $800 million to the government’s coffers.
Well, if foreign temporary worker super theft was the tip of the iceberg then what I’m about to tell you about is the bit of the iceberg just below the surface of the water – there may be a scientific name for it but I’ll be blowed if I know what it is!
As I mentioned above, while we were tapping away writing about the next phase of Super Thievery, on December 2nd the crooks in government and opposition nodded through a proposal that would steal $238 million worth of superannuation from Australian citizens and residents.
I’m not kidding. And I can’t even claim the credit for uncovering this scoop. And no, it wasn’t even our hapless friends in the mainstream press that spotted this one either.
Instead it was from intrepid Money Morning reader Steve.
The details are all contained in the mundane sounding, “Tax Laws Amendment (2009 Budget Measures No. 2) Bill 2009″. You can download a copy of it for yourself by clicking here.
Do you remember all the hullaballoo about the new tax arrangements for employee share schemes? You know the one, that’s where the government wanted to crack down on fat cat executives who were giving themselves a whole bunch of shares and minimizing their tax – terrible, terrible! Only the proposal managed to also capture a whole bunch of, erm, well, not fat cats as well.
Well, this little bit of superannuation thievery is tagged along in that bill.
And as the document notes:
“This Digest is an historical Digest, published after the Bill was read a third time in the Senate on 2 December 2009. The Bill was passed by both Houses unamended.”
We haven’t been able to locate details of how the vote went in the Senate, but odds are it was waved through by just half a dozen semi-comatose Senators.
So, what’s the deal with this bill? As I mentioned, this is the part of the iceberg below the tip. We’re not talking about the full scale theft of your superannuation – not yet anyway. For that we’ll probably have to wait until the Henry and Cooper reviews have reported.
This bill is just the government having another nibble to see what it can get away with.
Out of the 20-page document, the latest round of super thievery isn’t explained until page 18. In fact, it’s pretty clear that this proposal has nothing to do with the rest of the bill.
It has been tagged in there as an afterthought. It’s clearly a deceitful and malicious attempt by government to grab $238 million from everyday Australians with as little scrutiny over it as possible.
Here’s the details of what it means:
“[T]o require superannuation providers to give the Commissioner of Taxation details relating to small accounts of lost members and inactive accounts of unidentifiable lost members. The superannuation providers must also pay to the Commissioner the value of any such accounts.”
It goes on to state that a “lost member account” is where the super fund has been unable to contact the member and “the balance of the account is less than $200…”
Now, you may think, “Aww, if it’s less than $200 what are you fussing about you idiot? You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. 200 bucks, who cares!”
Like I say, the big scam is coming. This is just the hammy warm-up act. Besides, the bill widens the definition of what constitutes a “lost member account” to include where:
“the superannuation provider has not received an amount in respect of the member within the last five years; the superannuation provider is satisfied it will never be possible for the provider to pay an amount to the member, and the account does not support or relate to a defined benefit interest”
We love how they’ve specifically excluded defined benefit schemes. Could that be because the coercive (public) service is the main beneficiaries of defined benefit schemes? Of course it is – the crooks.
The amazing thing is, the amount of cash the government is set to steal from Australian super funds is more than they’ll grab from the much publicized employee share scheme (ESS) tax.
According to estimates the ESS will reap about $135 million, while the Super Theft will clock up $238 million.
Although in typical government fashion that’s the gross amount. Because they estimate it will cost them $8.4 million to implement the proposal.
Not satisfied with plain old stealing your money, they’re going to charge you for it as well!
If there was still any doubt in anyone’s mind whether governments are a monumental waste of space with the sole aim of ripping ever greater amount of dollars from your wallet, then this must surely wipe that doubt from your mind.
The next stage of this distasteful affair is to see what Emperor Henry and Jeremy Cooper concoct in their reviews.
Whatever the result it’s likely to involve less control for you, more control for government, and the eventual expropriation of money which you thought was yours into the hands of the thieving tax man and government.
Cheers.
Kris.
60-Second Market Round Up
by Shae Smith
The S&P/ASX200 did very little yesterday, gaining only 19 points to close at 4,673.50. The Aussie market has opened down this morning thanks to the lead in from the US.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics releases a couple of reports today, including the gross domestic product (GDP) data, at 11.30am. Keep an eye out for those reports.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished lower by 49 points yesterday, closing at 10,452.00. The Federal Reserve has been locked up in a two day meeting regarding monetary policy. Read more here.
Overnight in the UK, the FTSE ended the day down by 29 points, to 5,285.77.
The Nikkei finished the day at 10,083.48, down by 22 points.
Gold is still down from the highs earlier in December.
The price of spot gold in Australian dollars is trading at $1,241.15 while in US Dollars it is trading at $1,123.50. The price of silver in Aussie dollars is $19.22 and in US Dollars it is $17.41.
The Aussie dollar versus the US dollar is trading at USD$0.9057, and against the Japanese Yen JPY81.17
Crude oil closed at USD$70.87.
For the biggest movers on the market yesterday click here…
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/12/15/2772906.htm
We didn’t leave global warming for long did we?
CB – loved the article and particularly this para:
On the other hand, in regions where malaria is newly arrived, or has emerged after a period of remission, a plethora of interacting factors are at play, including forest clearance, irrigation, the mobility of people, urbanisation, resistance to insecticides and antimalarial drugs, the Aids epidemic, population increase, the degradation of public health infrastructures, and war and civil strife. Most of all: poverty. Poverty and malaria go hand in hand. There is no evidence or need to implicate temperature
Well said Sir! Poverty – the real killer not global warming. But let’s supposed global warming was real. Only humans could solve the problem and the more people that were educated the more that could put to the problem. And what is the greatest reliever of poverty. Why education! Off me soap box now
But Kris is right on the money. Governments love this tatic – change by stealth. Make the change but limit it. Thus less people affected by it thus less to fight it. Plus it sounds so reasonable so why fight it?
The they stretch it just a little bit. And another and then another and then there is no one left to fight it. It needs to be fought from the start.
But if this is such a bad thing why are we just talking about it? If we can see what is coming?
Nick well said. The best thing we can do for aboriginals is to treat them the same as us – as human beings. And, yes, educate them. lol. Sorry had to put it in, too hard to resist.
PF – Yes, I have seen the Monbiot – Plimer debate on Lateline, and have watched it again from your link. Unfortunately, those two fellas cannot stand each other, and the debate deteriorated rather badly towards the end. It appears that Plimer did make some mistakes in his book, which he is reluctant to confront and acknowledge, but on the other hand Monbiot also fails to acknowledge two crucial, and in my mind decisive things:
1.The material heavily relied on by the IPCC and the politicians has been exposed by Climategate to be exagerrated, and doctored data. If so, the current madness is simply without foundation, and the whole thing needs to be re-examined and openly debated by the scientific community.
2. The historical ice core data, which alone puts paid to the current hysteria about people being responsible for any sort of warming. This is what Plimer is trying to emphasise towards the end.
See again this brief slide show of the ice core data. Nothing like it to contextualise where we are at with the climate at the present:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbUVBYIPlI&feature=player_embedded#
On the climate change…was listening to public radio in the car the other (I am currently living in Texas), and they had a brief interview with Bjorn Lomborg in Copenhagen. The interviewer asked the “serious question” of the value of a polar bear. He said he wasn’t going to answer it, but the interviewer was pressing pretty hard, and he finally responded along the lines of “there are about 22,000 polar bears, to save them why don’t we simply feed them, it isn’t that many”.
He has my vote.
has anyone noticed on the news yesterday that they are “predicting” a resurgence of “swine flue” this summer season “due to the increase in holiday travelers from the Nthn Hemisphere”……is this a sign that the climate change scare is running out of puff and we need something else to worry us?? Are we to next expect and invasion from Mars so the whole world now needs to be taxed to fight them off?? hmmmm.
Right on, Nick. And, guess what, here is the unspeakable fallback position, when the ozone hole, climate change and bird flue have all failed: Our idiot politicians and their masters and minions can always count on China to come up with the goods!!!! That should give us a good scare.
In fact, the idea might not be as outlandish as it might at first appear. More and more it looks to me that the West have used the classical bait and switch tactic on China in Copenhagen. If you follow the noise, the West is chucking out the Kyoto agreement, and are trying to replace it with the Copenhagen agreement. This is what a lot of countries are up in arms about, because the new agreement is promising them less money. It is always the money. Even Mugabe and Chavez are climate change believers when there is the prospect of being at the receiving end of billions of our dollars. Good one, Ruddy, we will chalk this one up for Labor.
Anyhow, what the West now proposes is to put caps on China’s emissions, and wanting to be given access to emissions police from the UN to ensure that they do not go over their commitments. What this is really driving at is to gain effective controll of China’s power generation capacity, its cheap energy production, as there is no better way than this to keep it from developing and becoming a serious rival on the international stage, as many expect and predict it to become. This is a crucial part of the game, if you ask me, but China sees through the ruse and will have no bar of it. Good try, though.
Oh, sorry, I lost myself there for a minute, and missed to carry the thought to its conclusion: that the game of clipping China’s wings and keeping it in check is on. This has been also confirmed by the red carpet treatment India received just recently in Washington. Russia, of course, is still a nuissance and a potential source of resources and energy for China, as is of course, Iran. But the West is working on that, too, and if you have a good look at the map, you will see that China is effectively hammed in, that it can and will be starved of resources as and when deemed necessary.
Longer term, just as it happened with Japan for the same reasons prior to WWII, we could well be headed for a showdown, or at least a military stand off, with the end result being that China will be checked and kept down, unless there is a seizmic, civilizational shift, like the fall of the Roman Empire. We are living in interesting times.
cb – there was an article out the other day reporting that china will not stand for taxes being put on imports in regards to polluting in the copenhagen agreement.
So the US, EU etc… cant really raise tariffs on chinese goods because of the WTO laws but they CAN spew out a new Copenhagen agreement and use global warming as an excuse to raise tariffs on chinese goods…. i like it
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