In the 1980s the Australian Personal Income Tax was highly progressive and family payments were universal. The system ranked well in terms of gender equity and female labour supply incentives. During the Howard years the progressivity of the rate scale declined dramatically despite rising...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

The tax treatment of transactions under an emissions trading scheme is of critical importance as the taxation system has the potential to either distort or support the scheme. As pointed out in the Australian Government's recent discussion paper, the "Green Paper", the primary tax policy...

This paper builds on an analysis of VAT jurisdiction rules in Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 09/44, to consider intentional and unintentional double non-taxation issues in the context of VAT. Since a VAT is an indirect consumption tax, imposed on suppliers but intended to burden the...

This paper focuses on the principles underlying the jurisdiction to impose value-added-type consumption taxes (VATs). It analyses existing VAT models to identify the concept of consumption on which they are based and to determine whether there is a common language in which questions of...

This paper, an edited and footnoted transcript of a presentation at a research Centre of Excellence at Hokkaido University, looks at the influence of “responsive regulation” theory on the large-scale “Australian Consumer Law” reforms enacted in 2010. It outlines some frameworks developed...

In 2005, Professor Phillipa Weeks published an insightful chapter entitled ‘Employment Law – A Test of Coherence Between Statute and Common Law' in S Corcoran and S Bottomley (eds) Interpreting Statutes. That chapter examined the emergence, development and ultimate emasculation of an implied...

For the poor, finance is always about much more than economics. In practical as well as philosophical terms it is a matter of basic human rights. As the dust begins to settle on the global financial crisis it is certain that all economies will suffer, but it is in the poorest, least developed...

Is it the case that the law, in order to be fully legitimate, must not only be adopted in a procedurally correct way but must also comply with certain substantive values? In the first part of the article I prepare the ground for the discussion of legitimacy of democratic laws by considering the...