Bruce Highway....a joke!!!!

[silver]

Well, i've just returned from delivering my boat up to my mates place just south of Innisfail in Far North Queensland and can unhappily say the Bruce Highway is an embarrassment to the country .
I simply can't get my head around how bad it is.
I reckon tourists heading south from Cairns would be wondering if they had landed in the backwoods of Africa by mistake instead of a 1st World country. It's an absolute disgrace!!!
It reminds me of the Hume Highway when its nickname was the 'Highway of Death'.
Hundreds of trucks, thousands of grey nomads migrating north, the fishermen going to catch Barra at Weipa, the mining boom and locals travelling on this dangerous and time consuming bit of rubbish that is the No 1 highway in Australia!! Bloody astounding!!!
When i see the billions and billions spent on freeways for the Gold Coast and Brisbane i wonder what is going on. Surley any idiot can see that a road ( can't call it a highway) like this is bad for the economy and bad for the safety of road users.
A real shocker!!!

 

[Ratbag]

Gidday Silver

Welcome to Queensland ...

IF WA and Qld were to secede from the Commonwealth, we would be even more broke than we currently are ... Those two States between them generate about 80%+ of all the wealth of Australia.

Fortunately, the Privy Council held long ago that the Act of Federation was like the Diffie-Hellman algorithm - non-reversible ...

Then we get the Commonwealth grants system that gives funding to each State dependent on population (mainly), thereby allowing Victoria to have some of the best roads in the country, even though the average life expectancy of any major road here is about 20 years, and in Queensland it is lucky to be 5 years ...

This is due mainly to the rainfall (wash away; sometimes the week after a major rebuild ... ), and the hydraulic pressure this puts on heavily trafficked roads (long term damage to the road surface, specially at any slightly weak point, causing pot-holing and break-up of the surface). My Uncle was chief Main Roads Engineer for many years during my youth, and he explained the problems to me from about the age of 10 onwards (my age - not his; or the road's ... :lol: ).

The C'wealth funding is in no way tied to the needs of any particular State or Territory, other than to have an extreme bias towards Tasmania (acceptable, IMHO) and the Northern Territory (perhaps arguable ... ) and the ACT (completely unacceptable, IMNSHO ... ).

Queensland is also one of the lowest taxing States in the Commonwealth, and Victoria the highest, in an already highly taxed country - this latter in direct and unambiguous contradiction of the assertions of our Federal Government to contrary ...

Go figure.

 

[silver]

Not sure you are right about the 80% figure. Hard to imagine that the 2 states with the majority of the population don't contibute much to the overall economy. Mining companies might pay a far amount of tax but in fact are very low employers with only about 10% of the workforce and that has remained stagnet for the last 10 years.
By memory the tax collected and distubuted was on a per capita basis and NSW and VIC were always complaining that they subsidised the other states which in this country was probably fair because of the difference in size of the states.
Anyway...Victoria SHOULD have the best roads in the country as it is only 6% of the land mass with a good percentage of the population.
I agree that Qld has different climatic conditions that affect the roads but this road has to be driven on to see just how bad it is.
Political mismanagement is surley to blame here. As i said, it is no problem to find literally billions of dollars to keep the Brisbanites happy with their ring roads etc but bugger everyone else.
Just did a quick search re tax paid.....GST....13% of total.... Individual income tax.....36% of total....TOTAL COMPANY TAX.....15% of total. That is ALL company tax paid in Australia is equal to 15 % of Federal Government taxes. The rest is royalties that are paid to state Governments to use as they see fit. In queensland this does not seem to include roads unless you live in Brisbane or on the Gold Coast.

 

[Ratbag]

Silver

What needs to be understood is that income and taxes show as being accrued and paid where they are brought to account, not where the income is actually earned.

e.g. Telstra's HQ is in Melbourne, therefore ALL the income earned and the taxes they pay appear to come from Victoria, when in fact their business and income is generated from all over Oz. Even within Telstra itself, there are two different accounting systems in use - job cost accounting and financial accounting. Neither of these give any kind of accurate indication of where the components of the tax equation actually come from, i.e. Income less Expenses = Taxable Income, by geographical area ...

Ditto BHP Billiton, etc, etc.

BTW, the 80% is just a rough guesstimate on my part based on historical values over my adult lifetime ...

 

[silver]

I'm only pointing out that IN TOTAL only 15% of Federal Government revenue is paid by ALL companies in Australia regardless of where their head office is. That is ALL companies.
In the financial year 2007/08 NSW had 1/3 of the total population in Australia and so roughly speaking, if 1/3 of the Federal Government revenue came from individual income tax, NSW paid around 11% of the TOTAL Federal Government just in income taxes alone.
Anyway, it doesn't matter, nothing i can do about it.
I'm heading north in about a week or so, joining the Great Migration of the Grey Nomads. I'm sure i'll come across worse roads and won't be in any hurry.:ebiggrin:

 

[Davidov]

BTW, the 80% is just a rough guesstimate on my part based on historical values over my adult lifetime ...

80% is very reasonable sounding estimate, with WA being a bigger portion. Mining is the only thing that kept aus afloat during the recessions, and thats all WA has pretty much. :iconwink:

Its a joke that WA makes so much wealth yet we see very little of it invested back into our state.

 

[Rally]

For decades Queensland subsidised petrol. You cannot have it both ways. NSW had extra petrol taxes and ends up with worse roads than Queensland

 

[silver]

Yes. That petrol subsidy was stupid.
Back to the 80% figure. I'm having trouble digging up percentages of Federal Revenue on a state basis but to suggest that 2 states generate 80% of the countries wealth simply seems to be more than unrealistc.
The mining companies are very good at pushing their own barrow but they are not the be all and end all of the economy and Federal Revenue from them is not a big percentage of the overall tax take.
Remember that STATE taxes, like royalties, are NOT national taxes and are levied for the individual state use and are not for the use of the nation as a whole. There is a difference.

 

[Davidov]

Yes. That petrol subsidy was stupid.
Back to the 80% figure. I'm having trouble digging up percentages of Federal Revenue on a state basis but to suggest that 2 states generate 80% of the countries wealth simply seems to be more than unrealistc.
The mining companies are very good at pushing their own barrow but they are not the be all and end all of the economy and Federal Revenue from them is not a big percentage of the overall tax take.
Remember that STATE taxes, like royalties, are NOT national taxes and are levied for the individual state use and are not for the use of the nation as a whole. There is a difference.

80% in current times i could deffinately believe. Im not talking taxes because tax goes through head office which may be located in alternate states, im talking economic contribution on a whole. And while tax determines government expenditure, the money introduced into the economy finds itself into these projects through other avenues.

It would have been less ~ 5 years ago but not the production sectors in the eastern states have currently slowed enormously, while mining is in the biggest boom its ever had.

Im sure in time mining will slow and the production sectors over east will pick back up and we will see more evening out, but currently the inbalance is significant.

 

[silver]

If you are talking about the 'nations wealth' then that is taxes. There is no other way to measure it. Wealth is wealth.
As i said, mining is not a big employer in this country. Company tax as a WHOLE, regardless of where the company is producing, is not the major government revenue, income tax is. If NSW and VIC have over 50% of the population, roughly speaking they pay 50% of ALL income tax paid to the Federal Goverment. As far as i am aware the biggest coal exporting facility in the country, and one of the biggest in the world, is in fact in NSW at Kooragang Island at Newcastle. Hardly a minor set up i would say. Sure the iron ore exporting has gone beserk and gas is really coming on stream but there is life after WA and QLD.
If you are talking about 'capital investment' then sure i would expect that WA and QLD outstrip the rest put together but if a company plans to spend $20 billion on a project this does not mean that $20 billion will be spent in Australia. I understand that 90% of the steel used in these projects comes from overseas for example but that does not get stated when 'we are spending $20 billion' on a project.
Mining is important but historically they have not paid a lot of tax but are backed by gigantic money and feather their own nests as most large companies do.
Getting a fair bit off the thread here and it's not going to fix the Bruce Highway.

 

[Beigewagon]

Surley any idiot can see that a road ( can't call it a highway) like this is bad for the economy and bad for the safety of road users.

Silver, it is not just Qld, or the Bruce Highway. There is a patchwork quilt of bituman / ashphalt here in Vic that is being passed off as the South Gippsland Highway.

As in Qld, there have been several rain / flood events that have taken their toll on the roads. Governments (Local, State and Fed) are not funding the reapirs fast enough, regardless of where the money is coming from, it is not being spent on repairs/ maint. etc.

Beigewagon.

 

[NachaLuva]

The big dollars are spent where they get the most votes. Sad but true

As for the mining companies supporting the nation...I dont think so! The vast profits they generate are not spread around the community, in fact hoarded by a very few people, some of the wealthiest men and women in the nation. The rest of us get told how wonderful they are but dont see any of the benefits

 

[Davidov]

The big dollars are spent where they get the most votes. Sad but true

As for the mining companies supporting the nation...I dont think so! The vast profits they generate are not spread around the community, in fact hoarded by a very few people, some of the wealthiest men and women in the nation. The rest of us get told how wonderful they are but dont see any of the benefits

If you saw the affect the mining boom has had on WA you wouldnt be so sure. :iconwink:

 

[Rally]

The most populous state is NSW- but have a look at the joke which is the Pacific Hwy. It carries far more traffic than the Bruce Hwy. The mining boom is staggering. Earlier this year I went out to one of the big coal mines in Queensland. The number of mining people at the airport catching flights was a surprise. The royalties and taxes from these mines should be used on roads and also for developing dams for agriculture. But through gross incompetence the last Queensland government sent the state into huge debt- just as the last NSW and present federal government has done. The golden opportunity to have first class highways and railways has been squandered. An opportunity to build dams and irrigate the vast inland areas of Australia is passing us by so we can waste money on roof bats and school buildings that are not needed or are of no use and on boat people who receive goods some of which I cannot afford for myself.

 

[guzzla]

If you think it is bad now you should have seen what it was like in the '70's especially after the 1974 floods. I lived up there for 13 years then and when I go back now I can't get over how good the roads are. So it is all relative. Sure, heaps of money is being spent onroads in the SE QLD but look at the amount of traffic they are carrying. The Warrego H'way running west of Toowoomba out through Roma would take the prize as the worst main h'way in Australia at the moment (and it would be hard to find one I haven't driven on in the last 5 years) and is far worse than any part of the Bruce H'way, yet has become incredibly busy with all the mining demands.

 

[Davidov]

Aus roads in general are all a joke compared to other countries. On the main highway between Perth and Geraldton so badly bumpy you could almost get air at some points.

 

[silver]

Here is something i found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_states_and_territories_by_gross_state_product

Interesting really. Note the figures on the ACT. Public servants. WAs' figures would be because of the high mining industry workforce compared to the other states. If China clams up then WA would be in serious trouble whereas the ACT would be cruising.
Even though WA and ACT have very high per capita figures the weight of population and i would say a more diversified range of industries means NSW and VIC produce over 50% of the nations output. Much like i thought was the case.
I guess we take a lot for granted in this country. We want everything but don't want to pay for it. We have, overall, the best standard of living in the world with a tiny population and a land mass almost equal to North America which has a population probably 16 times more than us.
I think all recent Governments, state and federal, have been shortsighted, self interested with a focus of staying in power.
I can remember the Howard and Costello government telling us forever how good they were managing the economy but never gave pensioners a rise,never built a new port, etc,etc, BUT did manage to give never ending tax cuts to the middle class and wealthy, did manage to bring in a $6,000 baby bonus etc....why.... to stay in power.
They all do it. It's rubbish.
I do agree about the mining companies, they are not what they are cracked up to be but have won the propaganda war.
If they can get away with paying no tax, they will,if they can pollute, they will, bring in cheap labour, bend the rules..no worries. If you fight us ,we will spend millions on feel good ads.
An important industry....yes, but Australia could survive without them IF we had Governments that had foresight,vision,determination and were not devoting so much time and effort to stupid, pandering policies with the sole aim of getting self interested people to vote for them.

 

[Rally]

Actually in both cases I am quite some way from the exchange. I know what we have is not great, but nothing frustrates me as much as Sydney traffic. Perth is a breeze compared to Sydney. I am no expert, but friends who know more than I do reckon regional areas would be best suited to wireless. Things is, as no cost benefit analysis has been done, we are all in the dark. Only an idiot would spend $50 billion without doing a cost benefit analysis, but such is life. And our federal government

 

[Rally]

Once again I have to admit of my limited knowledge of this. So I don't know which technology is the answer or the pros and cons. While I accept that the copper network may well be reaching it's capacity- or maybe even reached it (I have no idea if it has or has not) then it would only have been in the last few years or so. The road and rail network has been that way since federation. We still have people who cannot spell or do simple maths. People who die waiting for operations. I have nothing against fast broadband- sounds great. But as with a building, let's get the foundations sorted so the facade will be around for a long time.

Anyone who wants to come up Old Windsor Rd from Parramatta to Bella Vista on any weekday off peak will understand what bumper to bumper traffic is all about. Or the M5, M2, or Parramatta Rd. There is no freeway linking the CBD with the southern suburbs and the south coast. There is no freeway to the northern beaches or north shore. There is no freeway to the north west. There is no rail network to the north west or northern beaches. There is no rail network to the southern beaches until Cronulla. The Pacific Highway north of Sydney, The Bells Line of Rd and Gt Western Highway to the west and the Orinces Hwy to the south are a dangerous joke. The Newell highway linking Melbourne and Brisbane is another dangerous road. There is no freeway linking the western suburbs with the CBD- the M4 stops 10k's short. There is no continous reeway from south to north, as there is another missing lnk between the M2 and the F3 of about 10km's. The cost in fuel and pollution from the lack of road and rail transport has been going on for decades and $50 billion would go a long way to fixing some of that. I won't die if the internet is a bit slow. It is on the cards I might because some narrow broken highway ensures a head on.

But when you have members of governments who are flown or chauferred everywhere, it is little wonder the roads and rail are a joke and we are getting an extravagance instead. Once that has not even had the rigour of a cost benefit analysis to confront.

 

[NachaLuva]

I do agree about the mining companies, they are not what they are cracked up to be but have won the propaganda war.
If they can get away with paying no tax, they will,if they can pollute, they will, bring in cheap labour, bend the rules..no worries. If you fight us ,we will spend millions on feel good ads.
An important industry....yes, but Australia could survive without them IF we had Governments that had foresight,vision,determination and were not devoting so much time and effort to stupid, pandering policies with the sole aim of getting self interested people to vote for them.

Couldn't agree more!

Re roads, every time I travel on Eastlink I get mad. We were promised a FREEway. Northern and Western suburbs got a FREEway. 2 weeks after the election, those *******s decided to make it a tollway!

The federal govt stepped in and offered 1 Billion dollars (thats nine zeros folks!) to keep it a freeway as promised. Our state govt criminals decided to keep their massive kickbacks (bribes), give us the you know what up the you know where and make it a tollway.

I'm a pretty peaceful guy but if I ever met that ******* Bracks I would commit such horrible acts upon his person!

(No I wouldnt really...just needed to vent lol)