Party Games 41/55 Rise Up Australia

One of the positives I get out of going through all the parties before an election is that I sometimes get into some interesting and unexpected tangents. In the case of Rise Up Australia, the tangent I went on was Saudi Arabian law. Why, you might ask. Because Rise Up Australia's founder Danny Nalliah claims that while he lived in Saudi Arabia he contributed to securing a royal decree allowing people to practice their religion in private. This seemed pretty impressive, so I looked online for this royal decree. What I found was most royal decrees are of an administrative nature, so things like appointments to government offices, amending existing laws, and the like. So I went further afield and it turns out that the US State Department in 2013 reported on non-muslim religious meetings being broken up and people deported for practising their faith in private. Maybe Danny needs to have a word with the current king.

Anyway, onto the party itself. It is right wing, anti muslim, and economically naive. Their big revenue raising proposal is a 2% tax on all transactions. So you take money out of the bank at an ATM, 2% tax. You make a payment online, 2% tax. You transfer money between two of your accounts, 2% tax. You loan your kid some money to buy their first car, 2% tax. You only ever deal with cash and keep your savings under the mattress, 0% tax. I don't think they've thought this one through. Fortunately they don't have any big spending measures to use all this money on other than reducing the GST and making it only apply to goods, not services, which doesn't at all go with their complaints about rich people avoiding taxes, because if there's one group that spends more on services relative to goods, it's the rich. Their unemployment policy is instead of giving people unemployment benefits, subsidise the hiring of unemployed people by an amount equal to the unemployment benefit they would have received for up to 12 months. I suspect a lot of people would end up getting fired after 12 months under such a scheme, especially as they also want to weaken employee rights.

And as icing on the cake, they proclaim global warming to be a hoax to gain the UN more power over people.