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Moguls go for gold at tax-fiddling
Volume 29 #44
April 15, 2015
That’s entertainment ‘Life is pain, Highness,’ said the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. ‘Anyone who says differently is selling something.’ Once you’ve grasped this fact – and it doesn’t apply only to princesses – you’ve inoculated yourself against snake-oil salesmen and can get on with entertaining yourself in a universe where one of the main stimuli to action is a particularly nasty one. Who knew when we slid so innocently down that birth canal? My chief form of entertainment is information. (Strictly speaking, all life is information.) I’m an information junkie. Have been since my learned father started bringing home library books for my five-year-old self. Can’t complain. I’ve made a living from it. The difficult thing is sorting the wheat from the chaff, or even knowing what old expressions like ‘sorting the wheat from the chaff ’ actually mean, and then being impelled by your addiction to google it. If you missed Discrimination And Discernment 101 at high school, you may have a problem. What we laughingly call my working day, which sometimes includes finding national and world news stories for Echonetdaily, revolves around information associated with politics. In Australia, politics seems to be based on finding ways to do the meanest things to minority groups while pretending to be in charge of a federal budget being disembowelled by falling iron ore prices. I then seek relief from such information in other information, and here the internet provides it in spades. (Why in ‘spades’? I must look that up.) Chiefly science. Science can be obtained by establishing a Google Alert for it or, once you’ve fought your way through the kitten memes, via social media. ScienceAlert, for example. This morning at 4am, woken by a possum dancing on the roof, I learnt that habitual procrastination can lead to heart problems, thanks to a study led by psychologist Fuschia M Sirois from Bishop’s University in Quebec. In addition, Rambo the New Zealand octopus has learnt how to take photos of visitors to its aquarium. ‘I, for one, welcome our new octopus overlords,’ remarks the ScienceAlert guy. And let’s not forget history, though most people seem not to have been introduced to history. The wonderful Lapham’s Quarterly reveals to us Commodore Matthew C Perry’s impressions on sumo wrestling in 1854, and the knowledge of where the Middle East went wrong when Cyrus the Younger attempted to ‘liberate’ Baghdad in 401 BC. By 6am so much is learned. In this way information softens the Dread Pirate Roberts Effect, and by these means I shall be entertained until the burning-out of the sun in five billion years’ time or my death – whichever comes first. Michael McDonald
The Byron Shire Echo Established 1986
T
he late Kerry Packer was notoriously reluctant to be quizzed by parliamentary inquiries – indeed by interrogations of any kind. He had, he explained, once died as a result of a heart attack on the polo field. Having been resurrected, he now had more important things to do with his valuable time than respond to questioning he regarded as irrelevant. Dragged before a senate committee on tax avoidance in 1991, he summed it up famously and succinctly: ‘If anybody in this country doesn’t minimise their tax they want their head read. As a government I can tell you that you’re not spending it so well that we should be paying extra.’ Well, perhaps, although it could be said that even the most incompetent government providing services such as defence, health, education and the rest are more likely to be worthwhile than the legendary gambling binges that were Packer’s idea of discretionary spending. It was once reported that when a Texas rancher boasted that he was worth $100 million, Packer responded insouciantly: ‘I’ll toss you for it.’ But the man in charge would not have seen the point of any rebuke, or any appeal to the idea of noblesse oblige that once was regarded as the birthright and duty of a former generation of tycoons. He could, and often did, indulge his private charities and causes lavishly and generously, but he regarded them as his personal right and choice; he was simply not interested in the idea of social responsibility or public benevolence. Taxation was just an imposition. If it was dragged out of him he would pay it, kicking and screaming, but not a cent more than he had to. And such,
overwhelmingly, is the case of his corporate successors ever since. The multinational moguls who came before their own senate inquiry last week clearly took the view that they were there to say as little as possible and do precisely nothing. And they were considerably more mealy-mouthed than Packer had been almost a generation earlier. The hard line was, if anything, harder, but they were not about to state the obvious: we’re grabbing whatever we can and sitting on it, and the rest of you can all get stuffed.
In this dystopia of international finance, there is no semblance of morality or ethics. by Mungo MacCallum They did admit that they were shifting billions from Australia and other destinations that have lower tax regimes wherever they could find them; given that this was pretty much on the public record they could hardly deny it. But they would never call it tax-avoidance, let alone tax evasion – the latter being illegal. Oh no, it was about being competitive. It was about providing the best and cheapest service they could find for their customers. It was even, preposterously, in the name of working on research and development for more wonderful things that would benefit the world. To which one can only reply: bullshit. In this dystopia of international finance, there is no semblance of morality or ethics; the words just do not apply to the reality of modern commerce. Tax may be, as Benjamin Franklin lamented, one of life’s inevitabilities, but the idea that it may be actually one
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8 April 15, 2015 The Byron Shire Echo
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of the bedrocks of civilisation, let alone one of the benefits, is not in the agenda. Tax is at best, a necessary evil: greed is good. And this impregnable refusal to even countenance the need for any change or modification of their mantra is what makes it so hard to come to grips with what is essentially a political problem for this government – for any government. The Tax Office’s Rob Heferen confessed that he had really no idea of the extent of what was going on; it was almost certainly hundreds of millions, probably billions, that
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should, in the scheme of things, being collected in Australia, but no-one would tell him. And as for actually doing something about it – well, that was just too bloody hard. Treasurer Joe Hockey reckons that he is going to try, but he is receiving little if any co-operation from the bureaucrats. He has floated the idea of a diverted-profits tax along the lines of the unilateral British model, but the Parliamentary Budget Office has already warned that this could breach international trade rules. Given that the Abbott government is happy to throw out international conventions when and where it suits them – refugee policy, for instance – this would seem not to be a serious impediment, but hey, now we’re talking about money. The shiny bums appear to favour waiting until the G20, or the OECD – anybody – gets round to framing a consensus model, but since that will involve hang-
ing around for at least the end of 2017, if ever, and is likely to settle things anyway, this is not good enough. The government’s political imperative is to do something in the budget, or at least to foreshadow it, so that it can convince the fractious punters that it is serious about taking on the big end of town, not just the battlers. But there could be a window of hope: the battlers don’t really like tax either. They say they want the multinationals to pay their fair share, but they are curiously uninterested in sticking to the rules themselves. Particularly since the introduction of the GST, the black economy has flourished. And even before that, fiddling the tax has become something of a national sport. The Tax Office has always been fair game, like parking inspectors and rugby league referees; if you can get away with it, then good luck to you. The theory seems to be that the government should be regarded as the natural enemy – wasteful, self-indulgent, and well able to afford whatever can be avoided or even evaded – there’s plenty more there were that came from. So rather than taking the high moral ground, Hockey and his colleagues might be better off going with the flow – saying yes, the big boys are getting away with murder, but so would you if you had half a chance. Why not lie back and enjoy it – throw yourself into it for fun and profit. That, after all, is what free enterprise is all about. And you can bet that the rightwing commentators from the Institute of Public Affairs, The Australian, the Financial Review and the rest of the neo-Liberal mob won’t give you too hard a time if you do. And nor, of course, will the ghost of Kerry Packer.
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