Top 10 at 10: Australian mining tax pain; British jobs hit; RBA's prostitutes; Dilbert

Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10am. I welcome your additions and comments below or please send suggestion for Tuesday’s Top 10 at 10

1. Double dip anyone? - The new British government is preparing to slash at least 300,000 jobs in an attempt to slash its 156 billion pound deficit, Timesonline is reporting. The risk of a double dip recession globally because of the cutbacks likely in government spending in Europe, the UK and the US is growing by the day. HT Hugh Pavletich via email

"Detailed research by The Sunday Times shows that at least 300,000 workers, including civil servants and frontline staff, will lose their jobs over the next few years. Some estimates suggest that the number of job losses could reach 700,000. A similar analysis of 75 local authorities suggests that at least 100,000 council workers across the country will lose their jobs."

2. Australian bank cracks down - Adele Ferguson reports at BusinessDay about the surprise receivership of electrical goods retailer Clive Peeters on Friday, which was pushed over the edge by National Australia Bank. Ferguson sees a new tougher approach coming from the Australian banks.

Clive Peeters collapsed last Wednesday owing NAB an estimated $38 million in debt. It had until June 30 to renegotiate with the bank, but a decision was made to pull the plug. The decision would have sent shivers down the spines of the many struggling property developers, retailers, pub owners and hospitality groups that owe the banks between $10 million and $100 million.

Many of these have been hanging by a thread for 18 months as the banks gave them a hospital pass to trade out of their debts. They might start feeling the banks' breath on the back of the neck. The banks' credit departments will no doubt be reassessing the risk of many of these companies, given the sudden sharp deterioration in market conditions, savage price discounting in the retail sector, and a returning fear and volatility to the markets.

3. Melbourne's affordability crisis - Marika Dobbin writes at The Age about the growing affordability crisis in Melbourne's housing market. The mood is definitely shifting quickly in Australia. The interest rate hikes have really hit Australia's very highly indebted household sector right in the goolies. Retailers are struggling. House prices are topping out. We should watch this closely. Where Australia goes, we go.

A SHEET of paper posted outside a shop in Victoria Street, Abbotsford, says a lot about the housing market. ''I buy houses and pay $20,000 more,'' it reads. The words, scrawled and underlined in black texta, speak to the edge of panic about rising prices that has pushed buyers to extremes in the past year.

Affordability in Melbourne's housing market has crashed in spectacular fashion, according to the HIA-CBA First Home Buyer Affordability Report last week. Although in the first quarter of 2009, houses were at their most affordable in eight years, things are very different this time around. Melbourne led a national deterioration in affordability in the March quarter, with a 16 per cent decline in just three months and a 33 per cent drop overall since last year's purple patch for buyers.

4. That bloody tax -  Ross Gittins at the Sydney Morning Herald muses on how the 40% tax on mining profits is proving a real problem for Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It may cost him re-election.

One small problem: the resource tax is so pure – so carefully designed to ensure it doesn’t do all the bad things it’s being accused of – that it’s almost impossible for anyone who’s not a paid-up economist to understand. Did it occur to the political experts that all Tony Abbott had to do to solve the Liberals’ acute lack of election funding was to oppose the tax then pass the hat round the miners? I doubt it.

Did it occur to the spin doctors that getting the business community and even the wider electorate to accept the wisdom and fairness of this tax would require an enormous effort by expert wordsmiths to formulate and feed ministers with simple ways of explaining the otherwise incomprehensible, rather than relying on their usual tricks of emotive slogans and manipulating the news cycle? I doubt it. You can see that from the way some smarty decided to rename the Henry report’s resource rent tax as the resource super profits tax. The half-baked notion was to heighten the great unwashed’s resentment of rapacious foreign mining giants.

What it actually did was heighten the resentment of the miners and the sympathy of the wider business community by rubbing in the notion that this was an additional tax on company profits, levied at 40 per cent. That’s a false perception, but it acted as red rag to a bull.

5. The cost is mounting - Reuters has a useful table here showing how many Australian mining projects have been cancelled since Rudd flagged the big new tax. Over A$100 billion worth of projects have either been suspended or are being reviewed because of the tax.  

6. Worse than Greece? - The super tax could be worse for Australia than the meltdown in Greece

PROLONGED uncertainty over the proposed resource super profits tax could pose a greater threat than Europe's debt crisis, according to a mergers-and-acquisitions specialist. Graeme Browning, Oceania managing partner of transaction advisory services at Ernst & Young, said the uncertainty surrounding the outcome was making valuing businesses within the resources sector difficult.

The Treasurer, Wayne Swan, said yesterday the federal government was continuing with its ''extensive and ongoing consultation'' with the mining industry over the resource super profits tax. Having met eight large resource companies since announcing the tax, the government will convene with another 10 in the coming weeks.

''Until there is clarity on just what the super profits tax is going to be, it is going to have an impact on many investment decisions in that sector," Mr Browning said.

7. We're so lucky - Luckily for us, we're so small and easy to beat up that China did a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with us in record time. It has been a raging success for us. Our exports to China are up 140% in the last two years. Yet for Australia, it's not proving so easy to do a FTA with China, Rowan Callick reports for The Australian. 

IT is five years this week since Australia began, with high hopes, its long march towards a free trade agreement with China. Last Thursday, Trade Minister Simon Crean, on his seventh visit to China in two and a half years, launched the new Australia Unlimited brand campaign at the Shanghai expo. But Australia's capacity to cut through the barriers and broaden its trade with China remains strictly limited. No big breakthroughs have occurred in the five years and 14 rounds of negotiations, and none is expected in the next round, in Beijing from June 28.

8. We're not so lucky - TechLibertyNZ points out that our Free Trade Agreement negotiations with the United States have now stumbled into the ugly area of intellectual property. This is code for the Hollywood studios trying to shut down our free use of the Internet. We should avoid this FTA because it will only allow the US drugs, dairy and studio lobbyists to bend us over a barrel. 

Of course, the USA has proceeded to reframe the agreement around its usual default template for any FTA - draconian IP protection on behalf of its content industries and limited concessions in all other areas, creating a one-sided arrangement. As Australia experienced in its FTA negotiations with the US, it's not about a meeting of mutual interests but a game of how much wiggle room can be found on the edge of the US demands.

9. 'Asian bodyguard' - This is a painful story for the Reserve Bank of Australia. ABC's Four Corners reports that a middleman hired by the RBA's money printing division Securency to woo a foreign central banker used to hire prostitutes to help seal the deal. The prostitutes were hired as 'Asian bodyguards'

The witness, who was a Securency employee, has given the Australian Federal Police his diary in which he recorded the middleman telling him in 2007 that the ''governor would be very happy if the commission [payment] was increased''.

The witness has said that one of the most senior Securency managers told him to arrange an Asian prostitute for a visiting deputy governor of a foreign central bank. ''Next time that this official was in town, [I was told] that I was to procure him a bodyguard, and with raised eyebrows and a wink … a particular type of bodyguard being an Asian woman.

He was suggesting I might like to procure a prostitute for one of the central bank officials on his visit to Melbourne,'' said the police witness in an interview with Four Corners. The witness said he did not act on the request although he believed other employees had arranged prostitutes.

10. Total irrelevant video - John Stewart at The Daily Show has a go at Sarah Palin.