Ah, the cacophonic sounds of injustice, echoing through the halls of Canberra like a bad cover of The Beatles' Taxman! If George Harrison were alive today in Oz, he'd be penning a sequel, screaming about how Aussies are being bled dry not just by income tax, but by a labyrinth of levies that make the original song seem quaint. As George Christensen rightly blasts in his fiery piece, "You're Being Taxed to Death," we're not just overtaxed; we're under siege by elites who see our wallets as their personal piggy banks. Widened GST? New land taxes? Super profits grabs? A 2% wealth tax? Scrapping capital gains exemptions on the family home? And the cherry on top: the Australia Institute's push for a death tax, so they can rob you one last time as you shuffle off this mortal coil! It's not taxation; it's predation, dressed up in policy papers and Treasury leaks.
Let's not mince words: the Australian tax regime is a bloated beast, devouring over a third of the average worker's income across federal, state, and local levels. You start the year slaving away until mid-March just to feed the government machine, income tax alone claims nearly one-fifth of your earnings. Then come the add-ons: GST on every purchase, Medicare levy for a healthcare system that's buckling, capital gains on your investments, stamp duty on property deals. Dig deeper, and it's a nightmare of nickel-and-diming: fuel excise jacking up petrol prices, fringe benefits tax on work perks, luxury car tax for daring to drive something nice, payroll tax burdening businesses, land tax on your patch of dirt, excises on booze and smokes, vehicle rego, toll roads that feel like highway robbery, environmental levies for "green" guilt, waste fees, council rates that rise faster than inflation, emergency services levies (because safety isn't free?), licence fees for everything from fishing to driving, and don't get me started on parking fines or the daily quota of tickets cops are pressured to issue. Add it all up, and it's not a system, it's a shakedown with the kangaroo and emu stamped on it.
And for what? Not to build roads or fund schools efficiently, but to prop up a bureaucratic empire that's duplicating efforts, resisting modernisation, and exploding in size. Federal and state governments overlap like tangled spaghetti, wasting billions on redundant programs. Private sector? Digitise or die. Public sector? Cling to paper forms and archaic IT, costing us $12 billion in lost savings and $19 billion in economic potential, per reports. Meanwhile, public jobs are booming; 135,000 new non-market roles forecasted for 2025–26, dwarfing the 86,500 in the productive private economy. Over 80% of recent job growth? In government or subsidised sectors. That's not prosperity; that's dependency on steroids!
Worse, the consultancy rort: $20 billion a year funnelled tofinance/accountancy firms, often for vague, value-less contracts. These outfits donated over $4.3 million to Labor and the Coalition in the past decade, creating a revolving door of public funds to private pockets and back to political coffers. Senate inquiries show this has tripled multiple times since the '80s, a perpetual gravy train while the middle class tightens belts. The self-made Aussies, the engine of this nation, bear the brunt, while elites hide in offshore trusts and loopholes. It's class warfare, with the productive class losing.
Christensen nails it: We don't need more taxes; we need less government. Slash the waste, end the duplication, digitise the dinosaurs, and kill the consultancy cash cow. Let Aussies keep what they earn. No wealth taxes. No land taxes. No death taxes. No raids on the family home.
But what if we could go further? What if we could dismantle the tax regime entirely, moving beyond this punitive system to one where money serves people, not the other way around? Enter the radical ideas of C.H. Douglas and his Social Credit finances, a theory that's been dismissed by mainstream economists but whispers of a tax-free utopia.
Douglas, a Scottish engineer in the 1920s, saw the economy's core flaw: a chronic gap between production and purchasing power. His "A + B theorem" argued that prices (A: wages + salaries; B: overheads like interest and profits) always outstrip incomes, forcing endless debt or exports to fill the void. Banks create money as debt, hoarding power and claiming ownership over the community's "real credit," our collective ability to produce goods and services. Douglas's fix? Government takes over money creation, issuing it debt-free to bridge that gap, without relying on taxes.
Key pillars:
National Dividend: A universal payout to every citizen, based on the nation's productive capacity and cultural inheritance (like tech advancements freeing up labour). It's not welfare; it's your share of the economic pie, ensuring consumption keeps pace with production.
Just Price Mechanism: Subsidise retail prices via rebates from a National Credit Office. If a product's "real cost" (based on consumption/production ratios) is lower than its financial price, the difference is covered by new credits, keeping prices fair and inflation in check.
Debt-Free Money: Governments create money as needed for dividends and rebates, not through banks or bonds. Douglas opposed taxing real property, seeing balanced budgets as outdated in a progressing society. In theory, this eliminates the need for taxes: Revenue comes from creating money tied to real wealth, not extracting it from citizens.
Could this enable Australia to move beyond taxes? We proponents say yes, and there's Aussie history here. Social Credit stirred interest Down Under in the 1930s, with groups like the Douglas Credit movement pushing for it as a Depression cure. Old proposals claimed it would "progressively reduce taxation and eventually cut it out altogether." A Reddit thread even claims Australia dabbled successfully between 1943-1945, ending inflation via some diluted Social Credit principles, but this is contested history. We modern advocates argue debt-free financing could fund infrastructure and dividends without hiking GST or introducing death taxes, solving our deficit without the pain.
Yet, in our tax hell, why not revisit? If bureaucracy's the problem, Douglas Social Credit attacks the root: money monopoly. Combined with Christensen's cuts, it could slash taxes while boosting purchasing power, ending the racket, empowering Aussies. No more working for the government; the economy works for you. It's bold, politically incorrect even. But in 2025, with elites eyeing your grave for revenue, maybe it's time for parties like One Nation to embrace Douglas social credit, and George Christensen to get onboard. That will really stir things up!
https://nationfirst.substack.com/p/youre-being-taxed-to-death
"While Treasurer Jim Chalmers sat grinning through the recent Productivity Roundtable, the tax-hungry elites were laying the groundwork for a fresh assault on your wallet.
The proposals weren't just bad. They were dangerous. A widened GST. A new land tax. A "super profits" tax. A 2% annual wealth tax. Even calls to scrap the capital gains exemption on the family home. Yes, they want to come after that, too.
And as if that wasn't enough, the Australia Institute is pushing for a death tax to claw into your estate after you've already paid tax your whole life. That's right. They want to tax you when you die.
A wave of new tax proposals, including wealth, land, and death taxes, signals an aggressive push by bureaucrats and elites to further raid Australians' incomes.
Australians already lose over a third of their income to an overwhelming mix of taxes at all levels of government.
The real issue isn't revenue shortfall, but a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy that duplicates roles and fails to modernise.
Public sector growth is outpacing the private economy, creating dependency and fuelling an unsustainable consultancy rort.
Rather than taxing more, government must slash waste, end the consultancy gravy train, and let working Australians keep more of what they earn.
Thanks to a leaked Treasury document, we now know that deep within the bowels of Canberra, bureaucrats are urging the government to go even further, raising taxes across the board while pretending it's about "budget repair." It's not. It's about power, control, and funding a bureaucracy that refuses to reform itself.
Australians are taxed hard. The average worker is now handing over nearly one-fifth of their income to income tax alone. That means for around the first two and a half months of the year, you're working not for your family, not for your business, but for the government.
It's not until mid-March that you start earning some coin for yourself.
And that's before you even factor in the rest.
There's the GST, the Medicare levy, capital gains tax, and stamp duty. But that's just scratching the surface. Then you've got fuel excise, fringe benefits tax, luxury car tax, payroll tax, land tax, alcohol and tobacco excise, vehicle registration, tolls, environmental levies, waste collection fees, council rates, emergency services levies, licence fees, parking fines, and the list keeps going.
When you tally it all up, the average Australian is now losing over a third of their income to taxes at every level: federal, state, and local.
(And we haven't even added in the blatant revenue-raising found in exorbitant fines that the police are obligated to generate on a daily basis from the very people they are meant to serve and protect.)
That's not a tax system; it's a racket sporting the Australian Coat of Arms.
And yet the bureaucrats and tax-happy ideologues still claim it's not enough. Why? Because they're protecting their own gravy train.
Instead of taxing people more, either directly or through debt-fuelled inflation, the government could slash inefficiencies, rip out duplication, and dismantle the bureaucratic beast that feeds off our labour.
For starters, we've got two layers of bureaucracy, federal and state, tripping over each other trying to run the same programs with different rules. Why are two sets of bureaucracies being paid to do one job… and to do it poorly?
The solution? Trim the federal fat, shift responsibility to the states where it belongs, and finally put an end to double-handling and bureaucratic bloat.
Then there's the problem of outdated processes. In the private sector, businesses digitise or die. In government? Paper forms, old systems, and decades of patchwork IT. One report showed reform in this space could save taxpayers $12 billion and add $19 billion to the economy.
But that's not the direction we're heading.
Instead, the public sector is exploding, and it's choking the real economy. Nearly 135,000 new jobs are forecast in the non-market sector for the 2025–26 year, compared to just 86,500 in the private, productive economy. And over the last year, more than 80% of all new jobs created in Australia have been in public service or heavily subsidised sectors. That's not real economic growth; it's government dependency.
Despite repeated vows by politicians to cut red tape, we now have 1 million people working in the public bureaucracy in Australia. And despite all those boots on the ground, departments are still forking out $20 billion a year for external consultants.
Why? Because much of the workforce is underutilised or mismanaged. And the consultants? One report found a good portion of the contracts "were described in such vague terms that they added no value beyond the category label." In other words, just more taxpayer dollars down the drain.
This isn't new. A Senate inquiry conducted last year found that government consultancy use had tripled between 1987 and 1993, and then tripled again between 2010 and 2020.
Sure, some consulting is legitimate, but what we're seeing now is not necessary. It's a rort, decade after decade. While everyday Australians are told to tighten their belts, this consultancy rort sees a revolving door where public dollars flow to politically connected firms and then back to political parties by way of donations. How so? Collectively, the major consultancy firms, namely PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG, donated over $4.3 million to Labor and the Liberal National Coalition over the past decade.
Meanwhile, it's the middle class and the self-made, the engine room of this country, who are being bled dry. You're paying the highest share, while the entrenched elites play games with offshore trusts, loopholes, and corporate carve-outs.
We don't need more taxes. We need less government.
It's time to stop punishing productivity and start dismantling the bloated machine that lives off your labour.
No wealth taxes. No land taxes. No death taxes. No family home grabs.
Cut the waste. Cut the bureaucracy.
Let Australians keep what they earn.