Picture from www.theaustralian.com.au
After seeing a friend's post in relation to this on Facebook, I decided to do some more reading as I was truly astounded by the headline. As a result I asked myself “Is there anything that this government will not do to hide the fact that it is truly incompetent when it comes to finances?" For those interested, the link to the article from The Australian can be found here:
The first paragraph from the above link summed it up fairly well as it reads “HOUSEHOLDS face losing up to $109 million from their family savings as the Federal government moves to seize cash from inactive bank accounts”.
The reality is that if you have a bank account that is inactive for three years then the government will seize the money and put it into Consolidated Revenue. This is just blatant stealing, that’s right “stealing”, after all it is your money !!!
I am sure that most people will have an adequate grasp of their own finances so that money would not be lying about in unused bank accounts. But regardless of this any money left in an account is still your money and the current government plans to “steal” it to boost their coffers and spend it on their programs most of which fail anyway.
The Australian government is being criticised for borrowing money to spend and has racked up over $250 Billion in debt (which has to be paid back sometime). This lavish spending has not always produced the right results, (i.e. some projects have failed) and now in order to limit the negative press (and interest payments) this government has decided that it will “steal” hard earned money from its citizens instead.
I would even argue that the previous legislation which allowed for bank accounts to remain inactive for up to 7 years before the money was transferred to ASIC as being morally wrong. After all, it is still my hard earned money and how I plan to manage it is my decision. So if I place my money into a banking institution to look after (and gain interest) over time I should expect it to be available when I want it and not be worried about the fact that a government may "steal" it at some point in time. Moreover I am worried about those people who put money away for their children (often when the child is born) for items such as schooling or university etc. Under the new legislation, this money is likely to be seized by the Government because of inactivity in the account.
This new legislation ranks up there in stupidity with the proposal to reduce the Research & Development Tax concession for Australian Business thus reducing the potential for innovation and potentially job creation in this country (or worse move the Research and Development offshore), and the increases to the private health insurance income limits thus potentially placing more people into a health system that is already over capacity.
Both these incentives were stupendous, but “stealing” from your own citizens in order to further mismanage the finances is simply wrong. Furthermore in a hint of hypocrisy, this government will throw money at families to send their children to school or $900 for taxpayers to spend as they wish. Would it not be better to find a better way to spend that money (infrastructure perhaps) or not spend it at all rather than spend the money in this manner and then “steal” it back from citizens ?
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