We have enough multi-national companies operating in Australia that shift money around the world to avoid the high corporate taxes imposed in Australia.

Maybe a 20 per cent levy on all money that comes from overseas to fund a house or property purchase in Australia would be a another suggestion to help raise funds for our lazy government  members who are not prepared to make the hard decisions.

This potentially would have an effect on the housing prices in both Sydney and Melbourne. Just go and try to buy a property in Asia and see what restrictions and taxes you will be subjected too.

Note with this tax the big four banks will have to reduce their dividends which will affect many self-funded retirees and superannuation pension funds.

Just be aware that it takes about five to seven years to see the affect of bad policy.

Over the last 12 months Australians made history by returning over 3.5 million cartridges through the ‘Cartridges 4 Planet Ark’ program. That means Australians were turning in 13,500 cartridges every working day, or 386 bathtubs full of cartridges.

Victorian residents and businesses alone returned over 977,000 printer cartridges to participating stores and councils, and of those, the good people of the city of Albury and city of Wodonga contributed 24,000.

Telstra and Crown were among the top ten corporate collectors, and Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi and the Good Guys all had Victorian stores that featured in the top retailer category.

Across Australia 900 kilometres of road – including some in Wodonga – have been paved with road sealant and surfacing products made from recycled printer cartridges.

Thank you Australia.

The residents of North-East Victoria and the adjoining parts of the Southern Riverina have had a previously good rail service to Melbourne emasculated over the last few years.  A combination of track and trains have failed, by a large margin, to meet reasonable expectations with the result being that there has been an up-swelling of community anger.

Despite all the attention, in the last week or so V/Line has struggled to provide one of of the three daily train services as a train (the others were busses) despite now having four train sets to cover the daily need for just two operating train sets.

In last week’s budget the Coalition government announced a commitment to (and funding for) the Inland (Freight) Railway between Melbourne and Brisbane, using the existing track to north of Junee in NSW.

This line when completed in the 2020s is predicted to immediately double the number of freight trains on the Albury line, with rapid growth to more than three times the existing number. Yet there is no funding for any track capacity improvement to allow for all these extra trains. 

The single track section south of Seymour will become very problematic when this happens yet we are told that the future freight trains will have 98 per cent reliability.

North Eastern communities can only wish that they had similar enforceable promises. Instead they should be afraid, very afraid, that their passenger trains will simply be sidelined as an irrelevance on this 'new' inter-capital freight route, unless the Liberal-National government can be convinced to route the Inland Railway via the Goulburn Valley as proposed by industry private sector group National Trunk Rail.