ACT's land tax addiction a source of much hardship

I do blame the government for much of the high rents being asked, however. This is supposedly the party for the average family, the workers, the less well off and "blah blah blah".

The ACT government levies land tax on all investment properties. Land tax is huge on Canberra properties, much higher than in NSW and Victoria.

I doubt most ACT residents are aware that when an average ACT house is rented, and the residential rates are, say, $2750 a year, the government charges the home owner/landlord about an additional $4000 a year as land tax.

Guess who those costs are passed onto in rent? The tenant of course. That is the main reason rents are so high here. This is a cruel, inequitable tax, and one of which ACT Labor (and the Greens) should be ashamed.

But there is more inequity built into the system. Compare two situations. One, a home owner like me, pays about $2750 year in rates for normal ACT government services. Joe Smith, renting next door, effectively pays through his rent, including the rates and land tax recovered by the owner, about $6750 per year for the same government services.

Every situation is different, of course, but that in general is the way it works. This impost has so many adverse social effects the mind boggles. They include rental poverty, social inequity and stress, homelessness, an inability to save for a home deposit, less money circulating in the local economy and investors moving interstate.

By the way, I don't own an investment property.

There many "service stations" in the ACT that do not have toilets for the public.

These facilities are vital for the parents of children that need to relieve themselves, people with a disability or kidney disease, elderly people with incontinence problems, pregnant women with "urgent bladders", and just any member of the general public in need of a toilet.

I went to an ACT Conciliation and Arbitration Tribunal last month to seek justice as a patron of a Coles Express in Canberra. I have chronic kidney disease and was denied urgent use of their toilet, which I was told was shut.

While the tribunal hearing was going on, the welcome news came from the compliance officer that Coles had announced the toilets would now be open. A week later, the same compliance officer told me the service station had shut its toilets 10 years earlier and had no intention of opening them again. Perplexing.

The plumbing is there, but not the will to renovate and provide a basic amenity for patrons. Sanitation is a basic human right. Coles, Woolworths, 7-11 and so on all profess to care about the rights of the disabled and the needs of their communities.

Legislators must consider this when approving service stations to trade. It is a complex issue as the service stations are private companies on private land.

I have a final hearing this coming Monday.

Faye Thornhill (Letters, February 24). I disagree. I believe you are an anti-vaxxer. I recently read this and immediately thought of you:

"If someone is pro-choice, they are supporting people to choose not to vaccinate. They are going against one of the most important purposes of vaccination, and that is to eradicate a disease (eg smallpox, measles, diphtheria etc) from the world. They are creating more opportunities for disease outbreaks and, by failing to support this purpose of vaccination, are essentially anti-vaccination."

"Pro-choice" might sound like a nice term, but it's anything but that. Supporting "pro-choice" policies or belief about immunisation is essentially supporting a decrease in our immunisation rates.

In a democracy, any adult should have the right to refuse vaccination for any medical condition provided they agree to their refusal being publicly documented.

In return for the right to refuse vaccination against COVID-19, those so refusing should have their names publicly listed as promising never to seek medical treatment by any doctor, hospital, accident and emergency centre, or ambulance crew for any illness they develop as a result of their refusal.

Surely those opposed to vaccination wouldn't want to be called hypocrites for seeking treatment for an illness acquired as a result of their own decision.

The ACT government hopes Stage 2 (Civic-Woden) of its light rail network will fit with the extremely sensitive Commonwealth Avenue section, including its iconic bridge.

Meanwhile the ACT is apparently pushing on with the only approved section - Civic to Commonwealth Park, which has its own major cost, time, infrastructure, heritage, safety, and traffic problems.

Many believe that the National Capital Authority cannot approve the Commonwealth Park to Capital Hill section, out of respect for the integrity of the National Triangle.

Politically, it seems that the federal government wouldn't mind if the ACT was left with "a tram to nowhere" ("Feds bring light rail boost", February 24, p1, and "Light rail cash injection welcomed", February 25, p13).

Both sets of politicians appear to have scant understanding of the sensitivity of Commonwealth Avenue and the bridge. Double brinkmanship seems to be going on, when there's a much better route available.

This route offers wider national capital coverage (with maybe one or two stations closed at peak hours) via Edinburgh Avenue or Gordon Street, Liversidge Street, Griffin's missing elegant lake crossing (for trams, bikes, and pedestrians only, and made yacht-friendly) between Acton Peninsula South and Flynn Drive (via the narrowest section of Lennox Gardens), and around State Circle as currently planned.

This would eliminate the very expensive requirement for underground power cables.

I love doing my crosswords and to help me solve them I sometimes look up the synonyms of words on Google. Recently I was looking up the synonym for the word liar. Several synonyms for the word liar came up; fibber, fabricator, falsifier etc. There was one that wasn't mentioned as a synonym for liar that I could suggest be added to the list and that word was "politician".

Recent controversy about referencing daughters in political debate reminds me of a previous example. In 1964 Arthur Rylah, deputy premier of Victoria, defended the banning of Mary McCarthy's novel The Group on the grounds he wouldn't let his daughter read it. When it was pointed out his only daughter was over 21 he replied that "he could always imagine one".

Facebook, with access to likes, posts, links followed, age, marital status, address, friends and all their associated details, has some of the most laser-sharp profiling capacity available. This enables news and information feeds to precisely match the user's biases and beliefs ("interests" is a misnomer), creating a perception a majority agree with and support them.

Ever deepening chasms in society result, undermining social cohesion and providing fertile grounds for populist politics to exploit, and for which Facebook offers the ideal tool.

Arguably in this environment, different truths can be offered to different groups, and many will not even be made aware of this by the news they receive. In such split societies, tell everyone the others were white lies to gain support and each group will confirm they have the truth. This is what deeply divided societies look like, societies in which democracy collapses.

So thank you Facebook for your offer to help make Australia more democratic again. Ongoing support would be greatly valued.

Note to Google: news and information feeds should not be profiled to the individual. They should be profiled by fact-checking, a useful challenge for your AI developers.

Spoiler alert! I do not and never have used social media, and I subscribe to The Canberra Times. The stoush over Facebook and its shutting out of news from newsfeeds astounds me.

Why? Because I have never understood why people source their news from the less-than-reputable Facebook and other social media sites rather than directly from the websites of the news organisations themselves, whether it be ACM mastheads, the ABC, SBS, News Corp etc. If I want up-to-date news, I go directly to the source - it is not difficult to do - rather than seek it second-hand from Facebook et al. I exhort everyone else to do the same. Maybe then Facebook et al will get the message.

Much as I agree with G. Gillespie (Letters 25 Feb) that thorium is a useful source of energy that has been used in nuclear reactors, I must correct his claim it has a half-life of 500 years. Make that 14 billion years.

There were always going to be arguments about who would get COVID-19 vaccine jabs first. We could start by relegating to the "bottom" of the list those who believed it to be a bowel-related virus and have their toilet paper supplies to "back" them up.

Is there any truth to the rumour that, following the past practice with funding rorts, one must be in a Coalition-held electorate to get the jab early?

Re "Keep bombing of Darwin in context" (February 22, p18). Darwin was bombed some 64 times or more between February 1942 and late 1943, a fact of which I'm sure Nicholas Stuart is well aware. Never let the facts interfere with a good story? Again?

If Barnaby Joyce wants the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in coal-fired power stations, the government will need to change its name to the Filthy Energy Finance Corporation. If his proposal gets up, I suggest Barnaby be asked to change all the corporation's letterheads by hand. If he writes it down a few thousand times, the gravity of his error might just sink in (maybe).

The great thing about a capitalist society is that once someone shows that there is money to be made doing something, someone else will come along and try to provide an alternative. Facebook has blotted its reputation. A friendlier alternative is bound to appear.

In November 2019 the Morrison government paid $190,000 to an empathy consultant. In view of the lack of empathy shown last week, it clearly isn't working. The government should ask for a refund.

The Canberra Times reported ("I made so many errors", February 19, p68) that Serena Williams was three months pregnant when she won the Australian Open in January 2017. Her daughter Olympia was born in September that same year. Is this another Serena record for the longest gestation period for a pregnant woman?

I wonder how many members of parliament who profess to being devout Christians adhere to the 10 commandments, in particular the ninth: "Thou shall not bear false witness"?

Surely there are more pressing policy issues facing Australia that our hollow federal government could champion than taking on Facebook just to appease people and groups who lost access?

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