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Australian Government sets some of the 'Australia tax' | 336 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Australian Government sets some of the 'Australia tax'
Authored by: globularity on Saturday, March 23 2013 @ 07:43 AM EDT
Australa is markup central, sure compliance with truckloads of regulations that
the various levels of government here produce does not help. Tax is average.

Our dollar is over valued which makes goods appear more expensive to people
overseas. I can buy a 10 year old car over here for little more than the cost
of a years petrol.

Supermarket groceries are expensive here.



---
Windows vista, a marriage between operating system and trojan horse.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Australian Government sets the 'Australia tax'
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 23 2013 @ 10:40 AM EDT
Do your homework before commenting. Imports over $1,000 attract a 10% GST and
that is all with the exception of a few items such as tobacco and alcohol that
have an additional excise. Imports less that $1,000 attract no tax, a fact that
is annoying many of Australia's traditional retailers.

There is a tradition among many retailers of inflating prices. They blame a lot
of things, but the root cause is that they do it because they can. It is true
that due to the high Australian dollar that resulted from the GFC basically
passing us by, prices are comparatively high compared to those overseas. Even
so, that still does not explain the size of the price differences.

Regarding the rest of your garbage about a bloated public service and so on,
that is not even worthy of a response.

The issue raised in my original post concerned software, especially that
downloaded via the internet. The maximum tax it could attract is 10%, and ones
and zeros sent over the internet are fundamentally no more expensive in
Australia than anywhere else, so why are prices 50%+? There was one example that
was raised where a particular package (I cannot recall which one) was cheaper to
get by buying an airfare to fly to the US to get it there at the standard US
price than buy it in Australia. The root cause of the problem are the parallel
import restrictions that allow companies like Microsoft to eliminate any
competitive sales channels that might undercut their price gouging. Personally,
I believe the government should eliminate this parallel import restriction, but
I suspect it would cause problems with an agreement signed with the US some
years ago. Maybe the threat of removing it will be enough to get the prices back
under control.

So, if we have finished with the ignorant ramblings from cretins who clearly
have no idea what they are talking about, I would still appreciate a sensible
answer to my original question from those who *do* know that they are talking
about. If a person in Australia uses an anonymous proxy to misrepresent
themselves as a US-based customer and then fool Apple's US iTunes server into
delivering a song at the US price, would that person run the risk of being the
victim of the same over-zealous application of the CFAA that we have seen in the
past? Would that person be seen as a hacker, accused of using fraudulent means
to break into a computer to acquire information to which they were not entitled?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Australian is known as the "Lucky Country"
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 23 2013 @ 03:50 PM EDT
So long as they can demand their price for coal, iron ore, yellow-cake,
LNG, beef, wheat, they'll have pockets full of cash. If I was selling
something to them I'd look for a good price too ...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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