I love that it helps you see how little of the welfare payments are going to the unemployed, since that’s the part that concerns people the most.

Always liked this because it helps people see to some extent where money is going.

I know the UK and Portugal do this as well. It was especially interesting in the UK during the Brexit years because you could see a tiny piece of that pie chart with EU contributions, almost saying "this is how little of our money is going to Europe", didn't do any good in the end but hey, still great info to have that all detailed

It must be so nice to see such a small bar for your defense spending.

I strongly believe that this should be the standard everywhere. Unfortunately most governments won't tell you this, because a few of them are busy building golden temples for their authoritarian leaders, and blowing half of it on cocaine while pretending it's the immigrants' faults

In the US that would be a list of Congressmen and the Billionaires who own them.

One thing to note about this breakdown is that it wasn't legislated with good intention but it was implemented in a very malicious compliance way that completely counteracted the original intention.

This receipt was legislated by the conservative party in Australia under Tony Abbott, the surface level intention was to "show where people's tax dollars are spent". However the underlying intention was to show welfare spending as a huge category that totally eclipsed all other spending in order to demonize welfare, particularly unemployment welfare. In order to build public support for rolling back that spending.

However when the letter was implemented, the welfare category was further broken down as you see here, completely working against the narrative that the government at the time was trying to spin (that unemployment welfare particularly was a huge drain on society).

Eww you guys are getting close to spending more on education than the military. Slippery slope.

This is pretty great. This should be happening everywhere.

Another thing that's great about aussie tax.. you can fill it out yourself, it's very easy, all online, and it takes a very short time. They also explain every question in the form and have lots of materials that you can read. For me, I finish it each year in about 10 minutes, and never think about it again.

That's slightly more than mildly interesting

I think something like this would make U.S. citizens feel better about taxes in general, since it can sometimes feel like you're throwing a large portion of your hard-earned money away.

The US doesn't give you a nice little letter, but you can go to https://usafacts.org/visualizations/the-big-picture/ to see something similar.

In America, our government organizations can't pass an audit

Cries in American 😥

Fun fact: in the United States you can request this same sort of receipt. It's slightly different, but all you have to do is request it, and they can show you exactly how many brown people they shot, or godless communists they've brought democracy to with your taxes!

It must be nice to live in a country where accountability is at least attempted. This shit would never work in Murica bc welll…. corruption.

USA:

Defense: |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| ||||||||
Boomer Welfare: |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| ||||||||
Interest on Debt: |||||||| ||||||||
Everything Else: |

W government. We need this level of transparency from all governments.

Where is the 1 trillion on defense? /s

That is very interesting.

So what they do is take your tax and apportion it over by the Expense and Net Captial Investment Statement in Budget Paper 1 (usually Statement 6).

It's dead simple to do and really helps communicate where your money is going in general terms.

It was a Joe Hockey initiative.

I think this is a pretty good idea, actually. While this kind of information is available in most western places, people usually can't be bothered to look it up and then have very weird ideas about what their taxes are probably spent on. This would at least help clear some things up.

In my country government spending is mystery for tax payers.

Kinda wish we got this in the US. Then people will realize all the junk our taxes support and will also (likely) want to cut spending.

Only in a perfect world

You can request this in most countries, especially here in Canada. It's cool that the Aussie government makes it more transparent and accessible though. The "other purposes" seems a bit sussy-baka, though.