It is a daunting testament to the failings of the Australian Rail Track Corporation to be awarded another attempt to rectify their own failings from the previous (upgrade).

The taxpayers of this nation should demand a better outcome for their dollar, even if we have to appoint an agency from outside of Australia to build the rail line to the desired standard.

International visitors have been amazed at the poor standard of our rail infrastructure given that we are a first world country. The rot has to stop, we can no longer afford to pour scarce resources into the hands of incompetent agencies, in the hope that more of the same will not repeat in the future.

We hear that the government is getting close to being able to have the Senate approve its corporate tax cuts at a cost to the federal budget of $65 billion dollars over 10 years. We have not been told how this is going to be paid for apart from the discredited trickle down economic theory and that it will improve wages and investment.

Modelling on behalf of Treasury indicates the after-tax increase in wages would be .29 per cent, and the increase in gross domestic product would be .79 per cent, after 10 to 20 years. That is not going to generate the revenue necessary to cover these tax cuts.

So my question is what taxes the government is going to increase or introduce or what services are going to be reduced to meet the cost? The government argues that wages increased in the United States after corporate tax cuts. However the answer is more likely to be fact that wages in the US have been flatter for longer than in Australia, and their unemployment figure is below the level of full employment.

In such situations the rules of supply and demand kick in and employers just have to pay more to get and retain workers.

There is of course another answer for the government. There is a major hole in Australia’s Petroleum Resource Rent Tax of between $20 billion and $26 billion annually, which is the amount Qatar  receives for its exports of  non-renewable gas resources.

The same multi-national oil and gas companies are probably involved in both countries. However Australia receives less than $1 billion annually for exporting the same amount of gas  and under the current regime this is not expected to increase for a decade or more. As a non-renewable resource it could well be all gone before Australia gets paid more than a pittance for it. This raises the question of whose interests do Australian governments look after.

The Petroleum Resource Rent tax was introduced by a Labor government and amended by a Coalition government making it even more attractive to multi-national oil and gas companies, who in the main pay little or no corporate tax.

I hope Australia’s cricket team is proud of itself. What a shameful day in our sporting history.

How sad that upon being caught they seemed to be the only ones with no real understanding of the seriousness of what they had done.