MY FINAL article for the year is not about regrets for opportunities missed during the past year, it is more about what our society has started but won’t finish.
Often governments prefer to sweep it all under the carpet and start new projects in the hope that voters will simply forget what needs to be completed to achieve more honourable and productive outcomes.
The number one issue has to be the unrealistic expectation in relation to politicians’ “allowable expenses”.
Yes, Federal politicians’ workplace is in Canberra where the front people or Ministers are the performers and the back benchers are just “their admiration society” and are only there to vote in a pack to support their Minister to get his/her views across and into legislation.
Those views are crafted by the public service and often a mystery to the Minister until he/she reads the speech written for them to the parliament.
My criticism is a firsthand one as it compares to my own business of some 40 years where I worked regularly in many overseas locations, but never once did I bring my wife or family along with a tax-free allocation.
Yes of course they visited the USA with me whilst our children were at school there and later in Switzerland and UK for university education, but that cost came out of our pockets, not the public purse as a granted freebie.
Intelligent consideration should be that many of us chose to chase business in difficult locations in order to increase our income, often burning the candle at both ends with the view of improving our ability to advance the family’s financial position, to create the prospect of giving the children a better education and thus better prospects for their life.
None of us should expect the taxpayer to blindly fund that risk and reward opportunity in order to do so.
Politicians, please clean up your financial and social messes before moving on with other items to improve your and our personal expectations, but never at the taxpayers’ expense.
By John BLACKBOURN
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