Fair corporate tax? Hey look, a new iPhone!

Later this week, you'll be freaking out when Apple releases its latest iPhone without that little hole for you to plug in your headphones. If, like me, you're nuts and you have multiple pairs of headphones, some of them stupidly expensive, you're about to be the proud owner of some very redundant technology.

The internet will lose its mind over this sometime around breakfast on Saturday morning.

It's weird and dispiriting really, because almost nobody's been freaking out over the titanic battle between Apple and the EU that's rumbled away for years, and finally erupted in the last week or so, when the fruit company received a bill for back taxes and interest worth tens of billions of Aussie dollars – enough to pay for a fleet of air warfare destroyers, or a couple of nice trips to London for Christopher Pyne.

Putting aside your feelings about Apple one way or the other, the tax ruling is way more important than any design change to the iPhone. (A change that will supercharge the wireless headphone market and which may flow through to Android users via USB-C. But that's a topic for another, geekier column).

The details of the tax case are less important than its meaning. Long story short, the EU says Apple got way too sweet a deal when it parked its European profits in Ireland. Apple and the Irish government disagree. Ireland finds itself in the unusual position of refusing to collect billions of dollars in tax from the company.

The fact that it's Apple and Ireland is less significant than the fact this happened at all. A good deal of what's wrong with the modern world is down to the trillions of dollars in tax that corporations and the super wealthy refuse to pay.

They're not evading tax, as such, because as Apple's CEO Tim Cook says over and over again, they pay every dollar they are legally required to pay. The problem is that legally they're not required to pay much if anything at all; not if they're willing to arrange their affairs to shuffle their earnings through enough magic boxes that eventually the money just disappears. It becomes invisible to the taxman.

Almost all big multinational companies do this. Some are such egregious parasites that they don't restrict themselves to neutralising their tax position. They actually put their hands out for a refund, even though they've effectively paid nothing towards maintaining the societies in which they do business. Companies like Apple, Google, McDonalds, IKEA, Qantas, Lend Lease, GMH and News Corp could not exist without the infrastructure of modern civilisation. But they aren't much interested in paying for that civilisation.

It's true that tax laws in the developed world allow them to legally pay almost nothing on the grotesque profits that they make, but never forget that collectively they spend billions of dollars ensuring the law never threatens those trillions of dollars in profit. Lobbying, political donations, outright bribery and corruption, or simple brutish electoral warfare such as the local mining industry waged against the ALP when Kevin Rudd tried to introduce a super profits tax, these are the reasons governments are continually in financial trouble. And the inability of governments to deliver on the promises made by politicians is the reason elections are increasingly vomiting up the likes of Trump and Hanson.

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