Tax systems are like septic tanks: they need to be cleaned out every 10 years or so What Should a Reconfigured Tax System Look Like?
Peter Costello is well aware of the old wisdom and in many ways Australia is the envy of the world in terms of strategies and innitiative to keep the economy moving in the right direction. Budget is an imperfect game, but the marathonial ten is pretty impressive Budget 2005: cash war chest
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Give & You Shall Receive: Big City Bosses
Builders, planners, salesmen, trash collectors — and political heavyweights. Meet the mayors who are making a difference
Walter Veltroni really gets around. During a typical working day recently, the mayor of Rome started with a visit to a children's hospital in the morning, attended a groundbreaking ceremony at a center for the homeless in the afternoon, and then dropped in on an outpatient rehabilitation clinic on the other side of town before the day was through. The gangly, bespectacled Veltroni, 49, may look like an economics professor, but some Romans call him the Plumber because of his hands-on approach to governing the Italian capital. Like an actual plumber, though, Veltroni isn't always available when people need him, so he's set up a network of municipal employees and volunteers who make the house calls he's not able to make himself. As part of the Solidarity Pony Express, a new assistance program for senior citizens, some 500 young people hop onto their scooters every day to deliver food, medicine or company to the elderly. In another initiative, about 3,000 mostly retired people fan out across schools and parks to keep a watchful eye on children. " Forum.
We want to show that in a huge metropolis, you can also be a community," says Veltroni, sitting in his frescoed office at the Palazzo Senatorio, overlooking the ruins of the
• Meet the mayors who are making a difference [If only Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, had attended the rallies in Riga or Tbilisi over the weekend to hear President Bush tell the budding democrats of Latvia and Georgia how important it is for them to protect minority rights. Perhaps Frist would have emulated former Soviet bloc countries and moved to dismantle his threatened ''nuclear option." But what's important for Eastern Europe is apparently not so important at home, where Bush and Frist are attempting to steamroll age-old minority rights in Congress in order to pepper the nation's courts with extremists A plot against the Senate ; Boiling Point on Judges: Powerful U.S. circuit courts of appeal ]
• · Has Germany sold its post-war liberties for a mess of pottage? Sixty years after the end of hostilities in Europe, Günter Grass argues, global capital has ensnared parliament, and democratic progress is in danger of becoming a commodity to be bought and sold on the markets The high price of freedom ; The country goes to the polls today after what many feel has been the most remote, unedifying election season ever. But when Simon Schama hit the campaign trail for the first time since he canvassed for Harold Wilson 40 years ago, the godless knockabout of British democracy felt like a breath of fresh air. And even Rousseau would have approved Now that's what I call democracy
• · · Too Much Logic, Too Little Evidence Defending Sweatshops; While Europeans share memories of the second world war, histories of 1914-18 are strictly divided along national lines Entrenched loyalties
• · · · The reduction in tax is welcome. The scrapping of the superannuation surcharge is also welcome, because in my situation it was nearly a $1500 levy Tax office's double dipping just not on: Ross Walker ; Qantas baggage handlers were paid $300,000 to smuggle a briefcase of cocaine through Sydney airport Baggage handlers 'paid $300,000' in drug plot
• · · · · Police investigating a cocaine smuggling operation run through Sydney Airport are hunting a man once dubbed the city's Mr Big of crime Cocaine trail points to crime head honcho ; Individual human rights need to be rethought in the age of terrorism and more consideration given to community rights, according to the head of the federal Attorney-General's Department Human rights must take a back seat in age of terrorism ; In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares The Shadows In The Cave
• · · · · · The celebrations marking the end of the "Great Patriotic War" are underway in Moscow. But behind the ceremony, Russia is marked by deep hankerings for the past. Stalin for president ; Henry Kissinger, The Australian Atomic Arm Twisting