soldiers were being wrongly accused and illegally investigated for war crimes.

Is honestly pretty unambiguous wording.

And the other evidence against your claim is, why would McBride had been pissed off by the ABC's reporting of his leaked files? If you were right, the ABC's angle would be completely aligned with McBride's. Why would Oakes allege there was disagreement there?

And the other point is you talked about Trump, which is the height of irrelevant since we are talking about Australia. If you're not Australian, get the fuck out of here. We don't need US politics infecting our country.

its extraordinarily useful to have everyone speak the same language the easiest way to achieve this would be to choose the language that the largest number of people speak so we will end up with English

I'm not sure how else I was supposed to interpret this. Maybe instead of being cryptic, just spell out what it is you're saying instead.

Completely agree. That property value grows over time in a fixed area is natural behaviour, as an area develops, density grows and demand increases. But that growth is not necessarily "productive". The only time that value is productive is if it incentivises redevelopment into higher density dwellings to meet the demand in that area. However this has been perverted into property owners who have paid off their property to just sit on the valuable land and reap the capital gains.

Capital gains from land value really needs to be taxed in a special way as you suggest. I would propose two approaches:

• Adding land tax (and abolishing stamp duty on property) that's not based on your property value but on the value of a property you're on (so high density apartments would end up with minimal land tax

• increasing capital gains from land tax by either having a progressive taxation rate on capital gains due to land value (which would ignore increase property value from renovations etc) or capping it entirely (so gains above that are taxed at 100%).

So what's not obscene then? 1x?

Honestly any business that uses an ISP email address just looks amateurish to me.

Surely what it demonstrates is once you have foreign citizenship, don’t go back to China? That’s not good for the Chinese economy.

I don't even think it's necessary to go that far. This should be "don't work in a political position in/for China".

I'm not claiming any moral high ground, I'm merely staying that she worked for a Chinese media organisation and that essentially makes her part of China's political apparatus. That makes her at risk of being a political prisoner.

Also as Raltoid said, she's spent 37/47 years of her life in China. Coupled with her career choice, her government is the Chinese Government, not the Australian government despite what her papers say.

Extra speed of build is a pretty good draw card even if it is 30% more expensive, and just diversifying the range of materials available for building high rises is always good for the industry. It'll be interesting to see where it ends up!

I'm not sure what point you're making, but someone sitting on 10 properties with a total networth of $20M cannot spent any of that until they sell the property. That's $20M is on paper wealth. That $20M only becomes real wealth when they sell up, at which point it attracts CGT.

In that case, if the renovation wasn't deducted off primary income by negative gearing, it would be deducted off the CGT tax when the property is sold as it could count as a capital expense.

https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Capital-gains-tax/Property-and-capital-gains-tax/CGT-when-selling-your-rental-property/#Capitalexpenses

I think the focus on negative gearing is a bit of a distraction. As many have pointed out, properties are only negatively geared because they are losing money, which makes them looks like poor investments in the first place.

What people miss is on a whole, property actually makes money through capital gains on sale of the property, which will easily offset any of the operating cost that's been accrued. Note though double dipping doesn't happen because what has been deducted on negative gearing is taken away from the initial value of the property, thereby attracting more capital gain tax at the end.

The primary problem is, land value and hence property value naturally rises over time and is unavoidable. As cities grow, they spread out or they get more dense. Therefore an single property will be demanded by more people as it closer than more properties (as cities spread, or more city centres crop up nearby), and lower density than nearby buildings (as density of the area grows). No amount of anger will change the fact that land is a scarce resource, particularly convenient land. And so that price signal is important to allow that land to be used as efficiently as possible (you couldn't want a giant farm near a CBD when it could house and cut commute costs for 50k people).

What we really should be doing is discouraging profiting off this natural and unproductive growth in value. Perhaps this could take the form of having a different capitals gain tax tier explicitly for residential properties. The other aspect is changing the primary residence exemption to be that you have to have lived in the property for at least 50% of the time you've owned it for, rather than just the last 12 months. Though overall, this would need to be designed carefully to prevent disadvantaging people who are simply wanting to upsize, or simply to relocate to an equivalent location.