Sensible suggestion

John McCaskey (Letters, Jan 17) has hit the nail on the head.

Bring in a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) of 1 per cent on all money movements (although I would include a few logical exemptions).

Alongside that should be the removal of GST; ie the FTT will replace GST.

This would result in prices in supermarkets dropping by about 10 per cent. Businesses would no longer have to do GST returns.

This would be a win-win for consumers and businesses with only the banks being involved in collecting the FTT, and as John pointed out in his letter, they already do take a percentage of some transactions. The only losers are sharemarket, currency and finance speculators.

Steve Cox, St Albans