“It’ll make it difficult to attract companies in Australia when they really don’t come to terms with the fact that we live a very competitive world. But it’s a sort of principle of more ad hoc, incremental  tax changes as supposed to a fundamental review of the tax system. We need to do tax reform. We need to make sure that we've got the revenues to pay for the future and we've got a tax system that is competitive. You can’t keep putting these things off. Every budget that we’ve been seen has put them off again.” 

 

Jennifer Westcott on 7:30 last night. 

 

Let’s look at the markets now. 

 

The Dow is up 124 points. The Nasdaq is 24 points higher. S&P 500 is 17 up. In London, the FTSE closed 54 points higher.

 

Looking at commodity prices.

 

West Texas Crude’s trading at 94 US dollars a barrel. Tapis is at 108 US dollars a barrel. And gold is trading at 1424 US dollars an ounce. 

 

The Australian dollar is buying 99.82 US cents and 64.98 pence sterling.