Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
Piketty n inheritance
It struck [Thomas Piketty] as odd the Australian Government imposed no taxes on those who had been bequeathed multi-million-dollar properties, while governments in the United States and Europe taxed the same gifts at between 40 and 45 per cent. “Japan just raised its top inheritance tax rate from 45 to 55 per cent last year,” Professor Piketty said. “This was under a right-wing government by the way and I don’t hear Angela Merkel or I didn’t hear Cameron in Britain say he wanted to reduce the inheritance tax of 40 per cent to the Australian level of 0 per cent so this [Australia] is very unusual.” The author of the best-selling book Capital in the 21st Century said while small inheritances of 100,000 or 200,000 could remain tax free, it made perfect sense to levy tax on property transfers worth millions of dollars.
