If individuals pay a lot less tax with a Debit tax rate of 0.7% - then any reasonable person may be inclined to think that the government is not going to collect sufficient revenue to cover all its expenses. Our response to this is simple - we only use official RBA and federal government figures for our calculations.

Firstly, from the Federal Government Budget for 2009-10, we only use 4 figures:

• Total government expenses of $339 239 million.
• Income of $24 547 million from Excise Duty.
• Income of $5 748 million from Customs Duty.
• Income of $24 767 million from Other Sources.

Secondly, from the RBA we only use 2 figures:

• Annual "cash withdrawals" from ATMs (calculated at $151 200 million).
• Annual "non-cash" payments (calculated at $44 000 000 million).

We now put all these numbers together in the "ASP Federal Budget 2009-10" and use the Microsoft "solve" function to balance the budget. At 0.6436% (we round up to 0.7%) the Federal Budget is balanced. So - will the proposed Debit tax of 0.7% (while keeping Excise Duty, Customs Duty and Other Income) raise all the revenue the government needs? In short - YES! These figures are not our own, they are from the RBA and the Federal government - so how can we be wrong!