Tax laws are based on policies developed by governments, which take into account a broad range of social, economic and political considerations. It is impossible to properly understand how a country’s tax system has evolved without taking these considerations into account. This chapter explores the political setting in Australia and the process involved in formulating tax policies and implementing tax reform. The chapter discusses various tax reviews that have shaped the Australian tax landscape and considers some of the more important tax reforms that have taken place over recent years. In particular, it discusses the Liberal–National Coalition Government’s ‘A New Tax System’ (‘ANTS’) reforms, which resulted in a number of significant changes to the Commonwealth tax system in the early 2000s (including the introduction of GST from 1 July 2000). It also discusses the ‘Henry Tax Review’, which was commissioned by the Labor Government in 2008 to make recommendations for the design of ‘Australia’s Future Tax System’.

CGT was introduced by the Hawke Labor Government on 20 September 1985. Before this time, gains that were not of an income nature generally escaped tax unless they fell within a limited number of special statutory income provisions. One of these provisions was former s 26AAA ITAA36, which taxed profits made from selling property within 12 months of its purchase. However, taxpayers could easily avoid this provision by simply selling their property outside that period.

Many considered it unfair that income gains were taxed whereas capital gains generally escaped tax. For example, it was viewed as inequitable that taxpayers who earned salary and wages were taxed, but taxpayers who made capital gains from the realisation of their investments (eg shares and property) were not taxed. The CGT regime was designed to address this bias by bringing capital gains to account under a set of special statutory rules. These rules were originally contained in pt IIIA ITAA36 and were loosely modelled on the United Kingdom’s CGT legislation. In 1998, as part of the TLIP rewrite, pt IIIA was replaced with new provisions contained in pt 3-1 (ss 100-1 to 121-35) and pt 3-3 (ss 122-1 to 152-425) ITAA97.

Chapter 16 discusses how labor markets are different from other markets we observe in the economy and how teacher labor markets may differ from labor markets in the private sector/other industries. The chapter makes the case that teachers are distinct from workers in other types of labor markets largely because of the nature of the industry in which they work and explores some of the theories that can contribute to understanding the complexities of this market. It reviews the principal–agent problem in educational production and the fact that teaching is a highly localized profession, with most teachers teaching close to where they grew up. Teaching is also largely a feminized profession dominated by public sector employment. In this context, the analysis in the chapter reviews studies showing that working conditions are important in differentiating teacher quality. The chapter also discusses how the teaching profession is different from others, focusing on who become teachers, where teachers decide to teach, the characteristics of teacher careers, teacher attrition, and the teacher reserve pool.

Chapter 4 reviews the underlying concepts of human capital theory, including a short introduction to the concepts of demand and supply and the relation between marginal productivity and wages. The first section of the chapter reviews the key assumptions of human capital theory – especially the importance of individual choice, the role of individuals’ initial endowments in making choices regarding investments in education and training, and the causal relation between individual skill acquisition and individual labor productivity. The second and third section of the chapter review some fundamental concepts of supply and demand and the relationship between productivity and wages – these sections are meant for students who have had little or no economics. The final section of the chapter discusses the fundamentals of the model of demand for and supply of human capital – first, in the early model of Becker and Chiswick (1966), followed by the more recent life-cycle investment model as described in Neal (2017). These conceptual foundations allow us to move on to more specific human capital analyses in the next two chapters.

International human rights law is part of public international law and shares a number of its features, including sources, obligations (primary rules) and state responsibility (secondary rules). While international human rights law has formed within the broader setting of international law, it has developed distinctive features. Traditional international law was an order based on the sovereign interests of states as its sole subjects. In contrast, international human rights law is characterised by its emphasis on common interests that reflect the fundamental values of the international legal order. This value-based approach is evident in the concept of jus cogens, or peremptory norm, and the notion of erga omnes, obligations owed to the international community as a whole. Undoubtedly, international human rights law can form an important component of a new international order or international constitutionalism. However, unilateralism, selectivity and fragmentation, in addition to challenges of effective implementation, are restraining factors that may slow down, if not undermine, ‘constitutional’ developments at the international level. This chapter examines these dynamics and discusses the key building blocks of international (human rights) law: its sources; its rights and obligations and the scope of their application; and its implementation as well as state responsibility and enforcement.

Chapter 12 focuses on how economists model production functions for education production units and, using these models, estimate the effect various inputs have on student outcomes. The most common educational production models are single output (usually student academic performance as measured by test scores), multi-input, and use secondary data collected at the school/classroom/individual student levels to estimate model parameters. Since these are not experimental data, students are not randomly assigned to inputs, and the main methodological problem is to identify the causal impact of particular inputs on student outcomes. The chapter discusses the role of teachers in educational production functions, the methods economists have used to estimate the contribution of teachers to knowledge production, as well as some examples of models to estimate the causal effects of other inputs into the production process – specifically, computer-assisted learning in primary school, summer school and student retention in primary and middle school, and an increased time on core subject teaching through a longer school day.

Chapter 5 treats the fundamentals of small-scale fading and the propagation mechanisms that cause multipath, doppler spread, time dispersion, and distortions to transmitted signals in the radio propagation channel. Detailed theoretical derivations and explanations for the small-scale channel impairments are presented with numerous examples. Flat and frequency selective fading, as well as fast and slow fading, are defined and analyzed. Key distributions found in the real world, such as Raleigh fading, Rician fading, and the classical Clarke and Gans model for multipath, are presented. Shape factor theory shows how the classical small-scale fading results may be replicated with excellent accuracy using the first thee Fourier coefficients of the spatial distribution of energy arriving at an antenna.

Ever since we began to build software systems that interacted with humans, there have ethical concerns about the ways in which we interact with them. In [830], for example, Weizenbaum observes of the world’s first chatterbot that “ELIZA shows, if nothing else, how easy it is to create and maintain the illusion of understanding, hence perhaps of judgment deserving of credibility. A certain danger lurks there.”2 Fast forward more than 60 years, and this observation that a “certain danger lurks there” has emerged as a range of different concerns about the ways in which software (and hardware) systems are developed and deployed, and the range of data that modern data-driven systems rely upon. The space of machine ethics is vast, and a large number of texts, papers, and policy documents now exist on the subject.

Chapter 8 presents the fundamentals of speech coding by first considering quantization of an analog voice signal.The time and frequency domain properties of speech are considered, leading to the various forms of speech coding that are used in wireless communication systems.Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM) is presented and explained, along with frequency domain speech coding methods such as sub-band coding (SBC) and adaptive transform coding (ATC).A wide range of vocoders and linear predictive coders (LPC) are presented, along with structures and approaches used in practice. The chapter concludes with a number of technical considerations used to select a particular speech coder, and studies the speech coders used in the 2G global standards in Europe (GSM) and North America (USDC and CDMA).