Commonwealth Grants Commission

Mr Janetsky will use a landmark National Press Club address today to attack the GST distribution.

Arcane wizards, I think, was how Bob Carr once described the Commonwealth Grants Commission.

I can't wait for Roger Cook to weigh in on this and call us all clowns.

Although they do have...

And so we want a basic baseline, if you like, we want a baseline that all Australians can enjoy.

And so the distribution of the GST Paula funds is determined by the Commonwealth Grants Commission.

And of course, these days, Ashley, it is so difficult to know where the GST is actually raised.

So, for example, just recently I booked myself an air ticket but I had to go online to a place, I dare say, in Melbourne or Sydney to book the air ticket.

And the idea is then when the product is sold, the consumer pays the GST.

But what happens to all the iron ore? It gets exported GST free.

And so what we have to do, and that's what the Commonwealth Grants Commission does, tries to equalize all those aspects that Tasmanians pay GST in Melbourne and Sydney, Western Australia gets a huge return of GST money for its mining industry, which then gives it huge royalties, which aren't shared in the GST pools.

So look, What we need is fairness and equity.

And while we've got an election special coming up in November, we're keen to do a what's happening here and now as we're approaching sort of the end of September and looking at the state of Victoria today.

We're then going to take a step up into the GST and the Commonwealth Grants Commission, which has made news recently over some of the events with WA and the GST top-up.

And we're going to dive into what the GST is and does and where it's come from, what the Commonwealth Grants Commission does with the money and carves it up, and what are the concerns on both the East, Central and Western states for the GST carve-up.

And then rounding out today, we're diving into a country that has a long connection to Australia, but often not talked about.

And, you know, as we like to do in the pub test, we like to dive into a country you probably haven't thought about this week, but probably should.

But onto, as I said, we wanted to have a bit of a lighter spin on Victorian politics.

We will dive into it in a little bit closer to the election.

But the other topical issue at the moment, extending from regional, is this weird organisation called the Commonwealth Grants Commission and this little tax we have in Australia, which all of us pay, called the GST or the Goods and Services Tax.

Now, we could just give it to each state based on their population.

but the government has quite an elaborate formula that's calculated by something called the Commonwealth Grants Commission, and this is designed to share the money quite fairly, largely based on the population of each state, but it adjusts for all sorts of other things, including the difficulties and the opportunities that different states have to either collect more money of their own, or in the case of the Northern Territory, for example, The fact that it's really expensive to provide education to lots of small remote communities.

So the GST is carved up between the states.

There's a formula for carving it up.

That's step one.

Step two, yeah, this sweetheart deal for West Australia makes no sense.

I think that the Commonwealth Grants Commission that helped divvy it up between the states do a pretty good job.

And if we want to change the formula, we can change the formula.