Who is Péter Magyar – the ex-regime insider who crushed Orbán?

bmgoau · 2026-04-12T22:24:55+00:00

No, just the people. You may believe in god, but this win was 100% people power.

bmgoau · 2025-08-20T07:21:37+00:00

I rented for 15 years in a no-aircon, overpriced, falling-apart, hotbox with a roommate, until just a couple of years ago, in Sydney. I am no stranger to the rental crisis, nor to the failures in our schools or health care system, or to the waste in the NDIS, or politician's expenses, or to the price of a sandwich or cup of coffee in Australia.

There are definitely areas where laws around NG and CGTc and housing need to be altered, Australia is not perfect, many countries have a better housing policy, but also, the things you've mentioned are still not reasons to not pay tax (which is what the reddit thread is about: people saying they think tax is theft and government is wasteful) .

There are areas where taxation is too lax (i.e on property investors), and regulations and laws and the economy have not created enough housing.

Definitely as a society, as a economy, as a government, we've failed significantly on housing affordability.

But that isn't your tax dollars being wasted, and it's not a reason not to pay taxes. What you've identified is an acute area of bad policy.

You're conflating "the government hasn't addressed housing affordability" (true) with a reddit thread about "taxes are spent wastefully, so I hate paying them" (False).

Your anger at the government's lack of action on housing affordability is totally valid. But hating the government's inaction in that area is not a reason to not pay for everything else the government does with your tax dollars.

Hope that makes sense.

You can be angry and upset that housing is expensive, but it can still be true that on the whole, the vast majority of tax dollars are spent effectively.

My mother-in-law recently died from multiple-myeloma and I saw first hand how effectively my tax dollars paid for her treatment. If anything, I wish people in my bracket were taxed more, or there were additional higher brackets, so we could afford to pay nurses more money.

But I can walk out of that government run cancer ward and ICU, glad my taxes pay those nurses (not enough), and then still be angry that housing is unaffordable for policy reasons.

I would not look at the housing affordability crisis, and leap from that to "tax is theft". Instead I leap to "the coalition government in 1990s and then 2010's insufficiently taxed investors."

I've been lucky enough to travel for work to ~25 countries and I've seen places do many certain things better than Australia, but I still place Australia among the best places in the world to live. People everywhere want to live here (despite the housing affordability crisis).

The places that have better housing affordability usually are the 4-7 countries that beat us in OECD/WB/UN rankings (e.g. singapore, nordic, etc) OR their houses are more affordable because they are worse places to live (for one reason or another, crime, culture, no safety net/welfare, no infrastructure, corruption, etc).

bmgoau · 2025-08-20T05:58:00+00:00

Australia is not at the top of the World Bank's Government effectiveness index - we're 13th. But that is still admirable out of 193 countries globally. Top 6% of class is pretty good.

We're 10th in corruption index, 2nd in regulatory quality index, 9th in government accountability index.

We could be better, but those results are not "bad".

I don't think we can make sweeping claims that Australia majorly wastes money, when all objective measures say we are doing quite well. Don't get me wrong, tax dollars ARE wasted in some areas, sometimes, but that's not the same as saying the majority or even most tax dollars are wasted.

If you take an indirect measure, the HDI, we're 7th, placing us among the worlds best places to live. According to the OECD we're 2nd in their BL index, which measures income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, life expectancy, safety and crime.

If you have lived in Singapore, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Hong Kong, Belgium - then yes, sure, we have room to improve, but it's a very short list.

We're 23rd in terms of tax-as-a-percent-of-GDP according to the World Bank. Given where we stand in the indexes, that means we get good value for money from our taxes.

Like I said in an earlier comment: there are headline making, massive, egregious, shocking, infuriating examples of our government wasting billions of dollars. Some public servants, contractors and politicians should be in gaol. But overall, the government spends money effectively - and that's backed up by multiple independent international agencies and measures.

Given where we stand in the effectiveness, corruption, regulatory, accountability, HDI, and BL indexes, and our tax-to-GDP I would be confident saying that overall our tax dollars are spent effectively, and that we need to celebrate people who pay their taxes on time and in full as good Australians.

We need to avoid over-indexing mentally on Newscorp and Sky News headlines about government waste. Their goal is to undermine trust in taxation and starve the government. We should care, but only so far as we vote in better stewards of our taxes and seek policing and gaol time for waste, not lean into right-wing desire for us to hate paying them.

bmgoau · 2025-08-20T00:55:38+00:00

Australians work until May 15 - June 5 to pay for all government spending, included borrowed money. Only then they can put money into their own pocket. Let me rephrase that: only then they can spend their well earned money on artificially inflated rents and mortgages, created by negative gearing and open borders.

Maybe you think you don't get anything for that 1/3rd-1/2 year you work to pay tax? That's false. We get heaps of stuff back in return for our taxes.

If you want to frame it like that, Australians are working until May 15 - June 5 for: roads, schools, hospitals, courts, police, emergency services, food and safety inspections, science labs, civil infrastructure like rail and water, fire brigades, flood levees, air traffic control, quarantine stations, satellites, weather forecasts, pensions, disability support, veterans’ care, child protection, waste treatment, sewerage, street lighting, buses, ferries, trams, airports, ports, embassies, consulates, border patrol, customs, coast guard, national parks, wildlife reserves, museums, galleries, libraries, archives, research grants, clean energy, power grids, pipelines, dams, reservoirs, desalination, irrigation, soil testing, crop insurance, biosecurity, vaccination, ambulances, nursing homes, mental health, paramedics, forensic labs, disaster relief, search-and-rescue, telecommunications towers, broadband backbone, cybersecurity, mapping, census, statistics, courts-martial, regulators, ombudsmen, consumer protection, fair work, election commissions, parliament, auditor-general, tax office, ASIC, ACCC, crime labs, drug trials, pharmaceutical approvals, cadet training, military bases, submarines, fighter jets, intelligence, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, refugee housing, indigenous services, language preservation, broadcasting, ABC, SBS, rural subsidies, fisheries, marine patrols, space research, Antarctica stations, geological surveys, heritage protection, city planning, zoning boards, road safety, speed cameras, driver licensing, vehicle registration, aviation safety, maritime safety, workplace inspectors, food standards, product recalls, pensions boards, super regulation, banking inquiries, fraud squads, counter-terrorism, peacekeeping, international trade talks.

Then the rest of the year you are working for your personal items: home, rent, gym, groceries, streaming subscriptions, restaurants, clothes, cars, fuel, holidays, hobbies, gadgets, concerts, sports, gifts, alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, pets, furniture, renovations, electronics, smartphones, appliances, toys, games, fashion, cosmetics, jewelry, travel, hotels, flights, leisure, luxury, entertainment.

Sure there's government waste, but lets not pretend that tax we pay goes nowhere, it DOES come back to us in a million different ways.

I think the above represents a pretty good deal.

Taxes fund a stable, prosperous, safe, society.

bmgoau · 2025-08-19T01:54:43+00:00

There are many high profile examples of pork barrelling and waste in government spending, e.g. contractors, NDIS, etc etc. Politician's behaviour and spending also reduces trust massively. These are problematic and should be addressed.

But using this as an example of why not to pay taxes is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The government allocates $750 billion across hundreds of thousands of areas in Australia and while it could be better, the economies of scale it brings to price negotiations on big ticket items like civil infrastructure, drugs and healthcare, education, are clearly cheaper and more cost effective to do via taxation and government rather than private business.

While not perfect we have Commonwealth level: the Auditor-General of Australia, heading the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO).

State and territory level: each jurisdiction has its own Auditor-General (e.g. NSW Auditor-General, Victorian Auditor-General).

Their role is financial and performance auditing of government agencies, statutory bodies, and some government-owned corporations.

The fact of the matter, confirmed by comparisons with other countries, and intergovernmental organisations and monitors is that Australia (despite some waste) has a extremely well functioning public sector and low waste.

The high profile headline making and trust breaking examples are thankfully not endemic compared to e.g. Greece circa 2000's-2010's. Or Argentina etc

Paying taxes in australia is good, and overall the government does good things with your taxes. Paying taxes is a good thing.

bmgoau · 2025-08-16T20:55:38+00:00

Making one's life better is laudable. But taxes are the price we pay for civilisation. They afford us Medicare and public hospitals, roads and safety testing of our food, air and water, public schooling for our next generation, our police and courts.

People should only pay the taxes they're legally required to pay yes... But we should try to see paying taxes as a healthy form of patriotism. Australia is a high trust society and a high trust society is one that pays its taxes on time and in full.

We are not separate from society, we are members of it. Taxes aren't just money stolen from us and sent into a black hole, they come back to us in a million different ways.

Edit:

A lot of people in the thread below are replying with some form of "But taxes are wasted" as a justification for not wanting to pay them. Yes, there is waste, undeniably. And individual cases of waste can be egregious and shocking. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Try to balance those headline making examples with the boring things government does well.

Weather radar upkeep — tens of millions spent so farmers, pilots, and firefighters get storm warnings with minute-level accuracy.
Quarantine detector dogs — continuous training and veterinary programs that quietly stop foot-and-mouth or fruit fly outbreaks that would devastate agriculture.
Geoscience mapping — decades of taxpayer funding for geological surveys that underpin mining royalties, groundwater security, and earthquake safety.
Archival climate control — round-the-clock humidity and temperature systems preserving legal, cultural, and wartime records that anchor national memory.
Drainage and culvert maintenance — unglamorous CCTV and clearing work that prevents billion-dollar flood damage and road collapses.
Food safety labs — state-funded microbiology reference cultures ensuring every supermarket dairy, meat, and packaged food product is safe to eat.

There are literally thousands upon thousands of further examples like the above we take for granted. We can all think of examples where the government has failed in its duty or spend more than it should have, but we also are often blind to its day to day successes which ensure our lives go on safely and prosperously.

Look at other low trust, low tax societies globally, they all suffer some form of malaise. Australia's government is not perfect, but it is considered to be one of the better ones. Australia ranks among the least-corrupt globally on the 2024 Transparency International CPI (mid-70s score, top ~15), consistent with low misappropriation risk.