Every new neighbourhood must have a market garden where residents can grow their own organic food and trade surplus with their neighbours. This would allow people to avoid paying high prices for poor quality food at the supermarket, look out for each other's crops, build a sense of community and belonging and have better health from eating nutritious fruit and vegetables. It will also teach civic pride and responsibility by not stealing from one's own community through their honour code.
That is extremely difficult. There's not enough land in areas like Sydney to even clear for housing, let alone organic farming. It will also consume a lot more time and people need to work. How would you deal with equity issues? This sounds like communism with all the farming and whatnot.
our zoning laws should forbid single zone developments for huge shopping malls, and tract suburban development that is the predominant building landscape in our capital cities. We can create livable higher amenity neighbourhoods by mandating all new neighbourhoods look like this with local cafe strips and 40km zones. Currently only exclusive neighbourhoods have this 'village' feel and part of the reason they are expensive is because people want to live there. I dont thing income should be a barrier to entry to living in a more walkable, community orientated, close to public transport area.
Costs lots of money to redevelop and refurbish areas. It won't be viable in some areas where there is higher percentages of people with lower incomes. also 40km zones are way too slow, people need to get around faster. Also, wouldn't you demolish the diversity of food options if we just limit it to 'local cafe strips'?
The reason people fall behind in our unequal society is because poorer parents send their kids to shitty schools and dont enforce discipline and a love for learning at home after school. What needs to happen to fix this is that we need to make teaching the same status as doctors. Teaching will now pay you 100k starting salary plus performance bonuses, ATAR starting at 99. Good teachers will get job security and benefits. We will also advertise in foreign countries for the best teachers to come here and teach our teachers how to do better.
How would you define a 'good teacher'? You also can't generalise and say all 'poorer parents' 'dont enforce discipline and a love for learning at home after school'. It could be that there are more pressing issues, such as family, that reside in their household. You need to look at the circumstances before you can make such swift generalisations. Also, if you make the ATAR for teachers at 99, there would be no teachers (plus they all tutor privately).
Schools will now be open until 5.30-6pm so that kids can spend time after school doing tutoring. Since everyone is forced to be there even the poor kids will learn about a love for education and be forced to complete their homework before coming home. This may be a good opportunity to offer free food to people who may not afford it.
Forcing people to stay at school around dinner time won't make them 'love' the education system. In fact, it could potentially strain a lot of families that are dealing with issues, etc. Is it really necessary to make students stay past 3:15 or whatever time school ends? It just seems like a waste if students have other activities to attend to, i.e. extra curricular.
We will abolish federal income tax. The GST money will now all be collected and go to canberra and the states will be able to raise their own income taxes. By allowing this, the pressure will be off of stamp duty from inflated housing, and the federal government will have less power to force the states to act in unison with their 'national plans'. Further, state charges on water and gas and electicity wont be massively ramped up because the state didnt have the means to pay for capital improvements. It also means different states can attract industry to them by having a low tax base so they encourage more foreign investment.
This can potentially create divides within state. What if the tax money was used differently for each state? How would that promote equality? Also, you need income tax and other sorts of tax to fund government initiatives that benefit the nation as a whole, such as Medicare and welfare (although that gets abused too much). What happens to Medicare when one state pays more tax than the other? GST won't be able to fund it all.
upsize meals banned, happy meals and advertising of junk food to children banned, mcdonalds only allowed in foodcourts and centres not in drive through strip malls, higher taxes on foods, mandate that supermarkets can have a 30 per cent maximum percentage of their stores dedicated to unhealthy processed foods, give tax concessions to retailers selling healthy or organic food.
Let people live their own life. If they want to destroy their bodies with processed junk, then let them do it. Isn't that whats this country such a great place to live in? Freedom of choice? Also, organic food would be quite hard to make "cheap". It takes farmers 3 years for organic certification and Australia probably doesn't have enough organic farms to sustain the whole country (i.e. low supply). What would we do then? Import goods? It could actually be more expensive for the consumer, because we will need to pay for all the tariffs and transportation costs that come with that imported organic apple or whatever.
and all roads must have a compulsory separated with a concrete barrier bike lane so that people on bicycles can use them and get priority over traffic
Compulsory underground bike parking stations that are free and rail cars on public transport for people to store bikes in
Unviable. In comparison to cars, how many people actually bike? Also, do you know how much room bike storage consumes?? Do you also know how packed the trains are during peak hour? It would be the biggest nuisance, plus it would cost a lot to redesign the trains for that purpose (i.e. ticket prices would have to go up if we were to fund such a impractical project).
