SO THE Party who will always lower taxes has opted to increase the Medicare Levy and introduced a new tax on the major banks, while removing the Budget Repair Deficit levy on high wage earners.

The Coalition spent considerable time and effort to reduce corporation tax, which was amended by the Senate to companies with up to $10 million turnover but have vowed to introduce the legislation to include all companies in the coming year and who will benefit? In particular the major banks.

The Coalition rationale for the reduction of corporate tax was that it would allow employers to hire more staff to help the economy and increase the tax take. Do they really believe that the banks will merely accept a reduction of their profits without either recovering these costs from their customers or reducing staff numbers or services? Perhaps the Treasurer could explain this major revision of his thinking.

THE Tasmanian Liberal Party has been promising as one of their platform policies that they would build a dual lane (two lanes each way) highway between Hobart and Launceston when it got into power. We are still waiting for this to start, all that has been done is patch up and no dual highway.

The federal government, in the latest budget, has allocated $96.5 million towards it so we are waiting and nothing less than a dual highway will suffice.

We look forward to a starting date.