Income management: a quick guide

Explains what income management is, who can be placed on it, what measures it involves, and where it is heading. Introduction Income management sets aside (or ‘quarantines’) a proportion of a recipient’s Australia Government income support payment to pay for necessities such as food, clothing, housing and utilities. Recipients can spend their income-managed funds using a PIN protected debit card, known as the BasicsCard, or by arranging for Centrelink to make payments on their behalf (for example, regular rent and utilities payments). What is income management for? The objectives of income management are to: reduce immediate hardship and deprivation by directing welfare payments to the priority needs of recipients, their partner, children and any other dependents help affected welfare payment recipients to budget so that they can meet their priority needs reduce the amount of discretionary income available for alcohol, gambling, tobacco and pornography reduce the likelihood that welfare payment recipients will be subject to harassment and abuse in relation to their welfare payments and encourage socially responsible behaviour, particularly in the care and education of children

The Budget: a quick guide

The Budget is an opportunity for the Government to inform the Parliament, and therefore the broader public, about matters including: the expected performance of the international and Australian economy the Government’s economic and fiscal strategy specific policy decisions the Government has made. Budget Night is typically the most important annual policy statement by the Government

Australia’s foreign debt: a quick guide

This quick guide looks at the level of Australia’s foreign debt, the interest liability on foreign debt and how these have changed over time. It also looks at foreign debt as a component of net foreign investment, the other component being equity investment. Finally, given that Australia’s gross foreign debt is now bigger than its annual gross domestic product (GDP), the quick guide also considers whether our foreign debt level is too high. What is foreign debt? Foreign debt is the amount borrowed from non-residents by residents of Australia. It includes securities such as bonds, as well as loans, advances, deposits, debentures and overdrafts. Foreign debt is a subset of the financial obligations that make up Australia’s foreign investment position.  It is distinguished from other forms of foreign investment capital inflow such as equity investment (foreign ownership) by the obligation to pay interest and/or repay capital. Foreign debt is not to be confused with national debt, which is the total government debt. National debt comprises government borrowings from overseas residents and government borrowings from Australian residents and thus excludes overseas borrowings by the private sector. A distinction is made between gross and net foreign debt. Gross foreign debt is the total amount of borrowing from non-residents. Net foreign debt is equal to gross foreign debt minus the sum of lending by residents of Australia to non-residents and official reserve assets held by the Reserve Bank

Earnings in Australia: a quick guide

This guide sets out the definition of earnings, and provides responses to frequently asked questions relating to earnings data in Australia. What are earnings? According to the International Labour Organisation, earnings are remuneration (either in cash or in kind) paid [to] employees for time worked or paid leave. It excludes employers’ contributions to social security and pension schemes. This is broadly consistent with the earning definition used by the ABS in Australia, although wages and salaries in kind are excluded from its earnings measures. ‘Earnings’ is typically a gross concept, that is, it is calculated prior to tax. ‘Earnings’ is a narrower concept than ‘income’, in that income includes remuneration from a range of sources, including but not limited to employers

The NASA master directory: Quick reference guide

This is a quick reference guide to the NASA Master Directory (MD), which is a free, online, multidisciplinary directory of space and Earth science data sets (NASA and non-NASA data) that are of potential interest to the NASA-sponsored research community. The MD contains high-level descriptions of data sets, other data systems and archives, and campaigns and projects. It provides mechanisms for searching for data sets by important criteria such as geophysical parameters, time, and spatial coverage, and provides information on ordering the data. It also provides automatic connections to a number of data systems such as the NASA Climate Data System, the Planetary Data System, the NASA Ocean Data System, the Pilot Land Data System, and others. The MD includes general information about many data systems, data centers, and coordinated data analysis projects, It represents the first major step in the Catalog Interoperability project, whose objective is to enable researchers to quickly and efficiently identify, obtain information about, and get access to space and Earth science data. The guide describes how to access, use, and exit the MD and lists its features

A quick guide to defect orbifolds

We provide a lightning review of the construction of (generalised) orbifolds [arXiv:0909.5013, arXiv:1210.6363] of two-dimensional quantum field theories in terms of topological defects, along the lines of [arXiv:1307.3141]. This universal perspective has many applications, some of which we sketch in the examples of 2d Yang-Mills theory, Landau-Ginzburg models, and rational CFT.Comment: 11 pages, contribution to the String-Math 2013 proceeding

A banker’s quick reference guide to CRA

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977

Performance of manufacturing industry: a quick guide

This guide looks at a number of key economic indicators to provide an overview of what has been happening in Australia\u27s manufacturing industry. Introduction As with many other Western countries, the relative importance of the manufacturing industry in Australia has been declining. Its contribution to total Australian output is less than half what it was four decades ago. This Quick Guide, which draws on the Manufacturing performance report, a monthly report produced by the Department of Industry, looks at a number of key economic indicators to provide an overview of what has been happening in the industry

Australia’s Preferential Trade Agreements: a quick guide

This Quick Guide provides a brief background to Australia’s preferential trade agreements (PTAs; often referred to as free trade agreements), in particular what they are, what they cover and commentary on whether they have been effective in increasing Australia’s wider economic welfare. What are Preferential Trade Agreements? A PTA is essentially a contract between two or more countries. Once ratified, a PTA is a legally binding treaty to liberalise access to the parties’ markets for goods, services and investment. At first glance, PTAs appear to go against a key principle of the multilateral trading system, the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) principle. In brief, the MFN principle stipulates that a country cannot ordinarily discriminate between its trading partners. However, a closer look reveals that PTAs can be accommodated within the multilateral trading system, if they comply with the rules