The looming economic disaster that means inheritance tax is inevitable in Australia - even after multiple governments said it would never happen: STEPHEN JOHNSON
Death duties were officially abolished in 1979, after Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen led a successful revolt against inheritance taxes. Since then, governments of all stripes have vowed never to bring them back.
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Telegraph
a few seconds ago
- Telegraph
‘Gay' Nigerian criminal can stay in UK despite using wife to claim asylum
A Nigerian jailed for violence has won a legal battle against deportation after claiming to be gay despite having been married to a woman and fathering a child by another. The man who arrived in Britain in 1983 made a series of initial asylum claims unrelated to his sexuality. Originally he claimed he would face persecution because of his political opinions. But when this was rejected, he sought leave to remain on the basis that he had married a woman living in the UK. After this argument was dismissed by the Home Office, he sought the right to remain after fathering a son. He claimed his removal from the UK would be a breach of his rights to a family life under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Jailed for violence Soon after he was jailed for four years for violent disorder, leading to the Government issuing an order for him to be deported. Once out of jail, he said he entered into a three-year relationship with a man, after which he submitted a claim to remain in Britain on the basis that he would be persecuted for being gay if returned to his home country. After a final appeal hearing, immigration judges ruled that they were 'satisfied to the lower standard' that he was gay, which would expose him to the 'real risk of persecution' if he was returned to his African homeland. 'Accordingly the appellant has a well-founded fear of persecution and he therefore qualifies for protection under the Refugee Convention,' they ruled. 'We are also satisfied that the appellant's removal would breach his rights under articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR.' Article 3 of the ECHR protects against persecution, torture and ill treatment. The case has been revealed in court documents, obtained by The Telegraph, and is the latest where migrants or foreign criminals have used human rights legislation to avoid deportation. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is proposing to restrict judges' powers to grant asylum under the ECHR articles 3 and 8 amid concerns a third of cases are now being approved for 'exceptional' reasons. The man, granted anonymity by immigration judges, claimed he had a gay relationship with a friend while at school in Africa. He came to Britain in 1983 but overstayed and left in 1992 before re-entering the UK in 1996, when he unsuccessfully claimed asylum on the basis of his political opinion. Marriage ends in divorce After unsuccessfully applying to stay on the basis of his marriage to a Portuguese woman in 2000, the couple divorced. According to the man he was 'in denial about his sexual orientation' when he started another relationship with a woman. They had a son in 2001. Two years later, he was convicted of violent disorder, after which he mounted a legal effort to avoid deportation, culminating in an appeal in 2015 based on the fact that he was gay. In evidence, he cited communications from his family in Nigeria over his relationship with a man from 2010 to 2013. He told the court they had told him to end it, saying he was 'bringing the family into ridicule and shame'. They said they would inform the security services of his sexuality. After his case was initially rejected, it was put before an upper tribunal where the judges accepted he had made 'numerous unsuccessful attempts to regularise his stay in the UK' and had 'a clear motivation for maintaining his claim to be gay and to fabricate having had a further relationship with a man'. 'However, we consider that the appellant's account should not be rejected solely because of his immigration history or because he did not rely on his sexual orientation to remain in the UK prior to 2015,' they said. They also found his evidence to be 'plausible and internally consistent,' ultimately ruling that his appeal should be upheld.
Times
30 minutes ago
- Times
Rising food prices mean hefty obesity costs
Stung by the price of olive oil? Burnt by the cost of your coffee? You are not alone. The cost of food and drink is increasing fast, faster than prices in general. This is a bigger problem, politically, socially and economically, than any politician has yet noticed. The government in particular should be paying attention to food bills, and taking action. The Office for National Statistics this week put the annual inflation rate at 3.8 per cent, but also showed that food and drink prices are rising at 4.9 per cent. The average household spends a bit more than £5,000 annually on food, so those numbers add up to about £250 a year. ONS tracking of public opinion shows that the cost of living remains the number one concern for the public, with more than 90 per cent of people citing rising food bills as a reason — well above the share who cite energy bills as an inflationary worry. Being reminded that things are getting more expensive — meaning that you feel poorer — every time you fill your shopping basket is not a happy experience. Food prices rising faster than the cost of other purchases has been a dismally common feature of the UK economy since 2022, for several reasons: war in Ukraine; too much rain; not enough rain; higher energy costs; not enough migrant workers to pick fruit and veg; higher taxes. The public's daily dismay at food prices, I'd bet, is a bigger reason for Britain feeling generally dissatisfied than noisier issues like immigration or crime. Yet it gets curiously little political attention, given how much it matters to voters' lives and outlook. Labour's spin team should give more thought to finding someone else to blame for rising food bills, not least because the problem is going to get worse. The Bank of England reckons food inflation will hit 5.5 per cent by the end of the year, while the British Retail Consortium says 6 per cent. Get ready for a winter of headlines about the painful cost of your Christmas lunch. Looking further ahead, the problem is even worse, reaching beyond simple political unease into questions of fairness, public health and economic performance. Rising food prices affect some groups more than others, with the poorest facing both the greatest financial pain but also the worst long-term consequences. The worst of these is rising obesity levels. Perhaps that will surprise some readers. How do rising food prices make poor people fat? Surely if it's getting harder to buy food, people will eat less of it and get thinner? In fact, a wealth of evidence shows that when low-income households face rising food prices, they trade quality for quantity, buying more cheap foods that are high in calories but low in nutrients. Social scientists grandly call this the 'food insecurity obesity paradox' but it's arguably just the human version of a common animal instinct to put on fat when times are tough and a hard winter is coming. • From peanuts to pomegranates — the 19 foods that will keep you young Almost a third of UK adults are obese, with rates highest among the poorest. There are many links between obesity and poverty but raw economics is a significant factor. According to the Food Foundation, a campaigning charity founded by former Tory MP Laura Sandys, recent years of inflation have made it almost impossible for poorer people to eat healthily. The foundation reckons that the poorest households would need to spend almost half of their disposable income on food to afford a healthy diet high in fruit and veg with limited sugars and fats. For poor parents, a healthy grocery shop could cost 70 per cent of disposable income. Healthier foods are just more expensive per calorie than stuff that's full of sugar and fat. Government calculations show that cauliflower and broccoli might cost almost 2p per calorie; for cheap biscuits it's less than half as much. Obesity means more sickness — diabetes and heart disease, in particular — and shorter lives. It means misery for individuals and mounting costs to taxpayers. My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that just a one percentage point increase in the obesity rate (roughly 550,000 more people getting too fat) costs the state more than £3 billion over ten years in higher NHS and care costs. We must make good food cheaper for poorer people, but that's far easier said than done. Continuing education to overcome ignorance about nutrition helps but new ideas are needed. What about Nutrition Impact Bonds? Building on NHS 'social prescribing' models, public and private investors could pay upfront for subsidised or even free healthy food for poorer households, then be paid back from the savings the state makes from lower obesity spending. The causes of higher food prices are big, complicated and long-term. Likewise the public health challenge of obesity and poor diets. It follows that fixing them will be a long-term project, the sort of job that no government, especially an unpopular one worrying about its next election, rushes to tackle. • Eating home-cooked food 'helps you lose twice as much weight' But Labour should lift food prices and obesity up its agenda, because they interact with the government's emerging economic focus. Ministers are planning an autumn drive on productivity, correctly identifying Britain's basic economic effectiveness — how much stuff do we generate from each hour of work we do? — as a national priority. Helping business to finance and deploy technology and training to make workers more effective is a key part of productivity, but so too is ensuring the availability of a healthy workforce. And our fatter, sicker population is emerging as a drag on productivity, as more and more people go off sick or leave work outright. Last month a paper by Nesta, a think tank, and Frontier Economics put the cost of productivity lost to obesity at £31 billion a year. The study shows that obesity doesn't just drag on the economy by taking people out of the workforce through sickness. Boldly, it says that obese people just aren't as effective at work as healthy colleagues and cost the economy almost £10 billion a year, it estimates. The government rightly wants to increase productivity but the fact is that Britain is simply too fat and ill to be fully productive. And in large part that's because of bad and increasingly expensive diets. Sadly, the cost of food is even higher than you think. James Kirkup is a senior fellow of the Social Market Foundation
Finextra
an hour ago
- Finextra
MoneyMe selects SEON to strengthen fraud prevention and credit decisioning
SEON, the command centre for fraud prevention and AML compliance, today announced that MoneyMe, one of Australia's leading digital lenders, has selected SEON's unified platform to bolster fraud detection as it continues its growth trajectory. 0 SMoneyMe will deploy SEON to support a multi-product portfolio - including auto loans, credit cards and personal loans - strengthening capabilities in device intelligence, behavioural analysis and second-party fraud detection. The decision follows an evaluation of multiple vendors and reflects MoneyMe's focus on preemptively improving risk management capabilities without compromising customer experience. 'SEON stood out for its flexibility, strong device intelligence and scalability,' said Jonathan Wu, MoneyMe's Chief Operations Officer and Chief Product Officer. 'Its platform will help us consolidate tools, reduce complexity and enhance both fraud prevention and operational efficiency as we grow.' The phased rollout includes fraud prevention and credit decisioning enrichment via SEON's data engine. MoneyMe will gain comprehensive visibility across all risk vectors through SEON's integrated dashboard, enabling coordinated response across its fraud, risk and compliance teams. 'MoneyMe is the kind of forward-looking fintech we built SEON for,' said Troy Nyi Nyi, Senior Vice President and GM, APAC, SEON. 'By combining device intelligence, digital footprinting and real-time compliance in one centralised command centre, we're helping them to both stop fraud before it starts and scale securely.' MoneyMe aims to future proof its fraud detection approach, add additional data points to enhance credit modelling accuracy and generate cost savings across KYC and onboarding workflows. The company also plans to expand SEON's role to include transaction monitoring in future phases.
