The Australian Taxation Office has a product, e-tax, for completing your tax return on a home PC and forwarding it securely electronically into the ATO and it also ensures that most refunds are issued in 14 days. Unfortunately e-tax is only available for the Windows platform. For a number of years the ATO has been promising to produce a version for other operating systems, but have failed to deliver.

As the ATO's web site tells us: "e-tax is not compatible with Linux or Apple Macintosh computers. However, e-tax has been tested successfully on an Apple computer running OS X v10.4.3 with Virtual PC 7 software emulating a recommended Windows operating system." So to use this 'free' product you have to purchase a copy of Windows and find a used version of Virtual PC as it has been discontinued by Microsoft. This shows how Microsoft-centric and out of touch the ATO is. If the ATO had developed e-tax in a cross platform version from the start it would have run on any operating system!

If you would like to run e-tax natively on your Mac, all Mac users need to start contacting executives in the ATO bureaucracy who can influence the product's development and complain about the discrimination against Mac users. It's no good sitting back and saying 'somebody' should do something - that somebody is you!

The Commissioner, Michael D'Ascenzo, takes the ATO's Taxpayer's Charter seriously. Under the Charter the ATO  undertakes "To make it as easy as possible for you to comply with your tax obligations we work with the community to develop services, publications and other information that meet community needs...". e-tax was used by 2.2 million taxpayers in 2008 and is a good product. Mac users deserve a fair go.

So I encourage everybody to shoot off a letter or email to the contacts below.

The official address send complaints is:
Complaints
Australian Taxation Office
Locked Bag 40
Dandenong Victoria 3175

But you may also like to include emails to a number of the ATO Executives, their email addresses are:

Michael.D’ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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You can read the profiles of the ATO Executive on their website:
http://www.ato.gov.au/corporate/content.asp?doc=/content/18206.htm

Then there are a number of organisations that can also put pressure on the ATO:
The Board of Taxation:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Commonwealth Ombudsman: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Inspector-General of Taxation: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Your elected representative may also like to get a message from you.
A list of Federal Members is available at: http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/index.htm
and if you need to find out your federal electorate go to: http://apps.aec.gov.au/esearch/

While you are at it drop a copy of your complaint to the Treasurer and Assistant Treasurer.
The Treasurer The Hon Wayne Swan MP or The Assistant Treasurer, The Hon Nick Sherry MP:
http://www.treasury.gov.au/ministerial.asp

You can also write to your local newspaper. So get writing.

DO NOT INSTALL EFI FIRMWARE UPDATE 1.7

Discussion forums around the world are rapidly filling up with people who've applied the EFI Firmware Update 1.7 to their new laptop, only to find that their after-market drive either becomes intermittent or is not recognised at all by the onboard SATA interface anymore.

Users who have been happy using their WD Scorpio Blues, Hitachi 7K320s, Seagate 500's and even the Intel X-25 SSD 3rd party drives until now have become furious that their larger, faster and better drives suddenly become un-usable.

At the moment, there seems to be no fix, except to fit your original Apple-supplied drive back into the machine.  Our advice to anyone using a 3rd party drive to think twice before applying EFI Firmware Update 1.7.

G. Ken Holman is a master of XML and for the next couple of weeks he will be presenting a series of training classes in Sydney. G. Ken Holman is a Canadian working for Crane Softwrights Ltd, http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/bio/gkholman.htm with a vast range of experience including

• Being on the committee that developed XML from SGML
• A founding chairman of the XML Conformance Committee
• The founding chairman of the XSLT/XPath Conformance Committee
• The co-editor of the OASIS UBL 2.0 specification 

Upcoming XML-related training being offered in the coming weeks:

 Sydney Australia - January 28, 2009
  Practical Code List Implementation (1 day):
   http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/training/pcli/pclisyl.htm

 Sydney Australia - January 29-30, 2009
  Practical Universal Business Language Deployment (2 days):
   http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/training/publd/publdsyl.htm

 Sydney Australia - February 2-6, 2009
  Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath (5 days):
   http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/training/ptux/ptuxsyl.htm

 Sydney Australia - February 9-11, 2009
  Practical Formatting Using XSL-FO (3 days):
   http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/training/pfux/pfuxsyl.htm

 Registration form and pricing:
  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/forms/register.php#form