Federal Budget

Well, the Australian federal budget was announced on Tuesday. I usually don’t pay much attention to it but one item mentioned in an [article](http://apcmag.com/6069/bland_budget_for_broadband_battlers) on the [apcmag.com](http://www.apcmag.com) website made me wonder.

>Barring the somewhat anticipated expansion of subsidies for solar power installations, the most technologically complex development in the entire budget seemed to be $20 million for an Australian Taxation Office software development project. For the 50% odd of Australians who already file electronically, the ATO will now offer pre-filled returns, complete with salary, benefit and health insurance information. Handy if you’re a standard salary earner, but hardly an earth-shattering development

$20 million for an Australian Taxation Office software development project that will offer pre-filled tax returns. $20 million dollars…. are they kidding?

The Australian Taxation Office has offered electronic returns for a few years now. It works really well under Windows but their solution for Mac users is to run it under Virtual PC. Considering the amount of cross platform solutions that are available these days, I find it extremely hard to swallow that they cannot offer a Mac native way of doing a tax return without having to use some kind of emulation / virtualisation solution.

I hope some of this $20 million will be used to address the current terrible solution for filing a tax return electronically. Changes are though that this $20 million project will be developed and released only to support Windows users.

I always do the survey each year after filing taxes about how useful (useless) the online system is for mac users. I always write constructive feedback about the many cross platform solutions that could be used to make the system useable for people on any computing platform. Who knows who actually gets the feedback and whether it’s actually read / passed on.

It’s a joke.