Last week we learnt that our tax burden is worse than many of us would have expected. The terrorising tax facts came home harder for me as I’ve been overseas. As a tourist, you do get staggered at the taxes that hotels add to your bill as you depart their wonderful abodes.

And regrettably, many overseas travel businesses are adopting the US practice of service charges, but there’s still a request for a gratuity or tip. I thought (and I’m not alone) that service charges were introduced in the US to cover the tips foreigners weren’t used to paying because their wage systems were better and fairer than the good old “land of the free” who aren’t known to pay decent wages!

All this adds to the confusion of travel and taxes. And given the local tax story this week, this tax confusion is everywhere.

These tax exposes come as I’ve had a busy week in Paris, and I’ve kept doing my crosses with Ben Fordham on 2GB each morning. When I was in the UK two weeks ago, 6.30am Sydney time was 7.30pm in London, which meant I got to sleep in after eating later than usual!

However, by the time I got to Paris, daylight saving kicked off, so I’ve been doing my morning spot at 9.30pm, which meant I had to slip out of the Moulin Rouge show (starring some 25 Aussies) to report on Lindsay Fox’s battle with the banks over his Armaguard business.

Then the next night around 9.30pm, I was in the best Japanese restaurant in Paris that I’d ever been to. It’s called Hakuba in the Hotel Cheval Blanc, just behind the Louvre near the Seine. I had to look at this tax grab story by the governments and businesses of Australia that resulted in the following:

1. Australian households are devoting 35-45% of their income to taxes.
2. The total tax take is around 30% of what we produce and is recorded as Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
3. The federal and state governments collected $29,700 in tax for every adult and child this financial year.
4. And it’s not just the slugs of the federal, state, and local governments. Robert Carling from The Centre for Independent Studies explains that “…taxes for which the business sector is legally responsible are in effect passed on to the household sector through higher prices and lower wages and shareholder returns.” (Not all businesses can do this but big businesses with little competition do pass on a lot of their tax hits to their dependent customers.)
5. Payroll tax and company tax are passed on to consumers in the form of lower wages, higher prices, and lower shareholder returns.

All this was reported by Chris Pearce in The Australian and it comes from a CIP report called The Truth About the Tax Burden. Carling thinks it’s time National Cabinet (which is a forum for the Prime Minister, Premiers and Chief Ministers to meet and work collaboratively) to look at the overall size of the tax slug.

Of course, if the money was universally seen as being spent wisely, fairly, and productively, we might look at this big tax grab and say, ‘oh well, at least we’re getting a good return on our tax losses to government and business’.

However, I suspect many Australians relate to the immortal words of Network Nine founder, Kerry Packer, who once faced a Senate Inquiry in 1991. On his tax affairs he responded to an objectionable question from a politician with the following: “I am not evading tax in any way shape or form. Now, of course, I am minimising my tax and if anybody in this country doesn't minimise their tax, they want they their head read, because, as a government, I can tell you, you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra”.

The day a politician comes along who can sensibly talk to us about tax reform and spending reform, they’ll not only gain a lot of support from sensible people, we might even get a Prime Minister we’d be pretty proud of representing and leading us.

As an optimist, I live in hope. In the meantime, I just hope National Cabinet at least has a good think about the tax we’re paying and how public servants are spending our tax money.