Welcome to my Canberra diary. I’m allowed to say what I think whenever I like, and lucky you can interact if you like. The downside for this indulgence is that all the words stay forever so I can be judged for my sins.

If this weird idea survives, I’m going to lobby for the f2 techheads to add a program called “MPoll”, where I’ll ask a question and you can vote (and suggest your own). I’ll send the results to whoever is responsible for the question or the answer and publish their response, if any.

My biggest wish amid the GST blues is that the media not report any of the politicans’ spins, strategems and rhetoric and that we don’t use up valuable space pontificating about who’s on top, under pressure or on the line. Surely July 1 was the day the politicians handed over to the people and the media began reporting what consumers and small business think, how they cope and if they reckon they’re better off. Let the politicians bombast all they like and get their cheap thrills from pointscoring. Let the media report the people only until October 1. This is a time to collect the information, not let the politicians manipulate the ambience before the facts are known.

I can’t resist recording my best guess, though, before holding my peace. Poorer people will be worse off because their tax cuts are so frighteningly skinny they can’t survive even minor errors in price assumptions. That will hurt the Coalition big time in the bush, as the Nationals’ desperate campaign for caravan residents showed. The Australian Bureau of Statistics published “Social Trends 2000” today and noted that in 1999 “most people living in areas of low socio-economic status live in major urban centres, but such groups tend to be over-represented in smaller towns and geographically isolated locations”. The Liberals haven’t learned the Pauline Hanson/Jeff Kennett lesson and they’ll pay for it. Middle earners with reasonable net tax cuts won’t be happy either because that extra cash and more will go to private schooling (because public school standards and facilities have declined) and to private health insurance (because the Government won’t properly fund public hospitals and instead props up the private sector). Many upper income voters, if the recent Australian survey is to be believed, are starting to get rather uncomfortable with the ever growing gap between rich and poor, which will only be exacerbated by the tax reforms, which give them heaps more in the pocket even after the Democrats removed their cream.

Overall, I agree with National Party leader, John Anderson, who’s been saying since 1999 that people can now actually see that tax cuts are illusory. They mean simply that with your tax cut, you pay for things the Government used to provide well and for free. And that gets back to who we are as a society. I say the egalitarian streak survives and that unless John Howard can alter his tax reform to make gestures to that ideal, he’ll be out of office next year.