En Passant

These are the overlong notes of my draft talk that I have to basically cut in half for my talk next week at the ANU College of Law National Law Reform Conference. I will be speaking on tax, inequality and challenges for the future.

If Labor were serious about addressing the high price of housing and the impact this is having on both first home buyers and renters it would begin a program of state housing that addressed the needs of working class Australians. Such a program could be funded by taxing the rich capitalist class who benefit from having a well housed, rested working class. Labor won’t do that since it is wedded to the market and market ‘solutions’. That marriage explains its mickey mouse negative gearing proposals.

Someone I know writing in socialist magazine Solidarity about tax reform and the GST scam. To read the whole article in Solidarity click on Turnbull’s tax reform aims to boost corporate profits.

Australia is a low tax, low spending country. It’s time we started taxing the rich and the big business tax avoiders more, not less.

My article on tax avoidance and tax reform in the hot off the presses Solidarity Magazine​.

I conclude:

The revelations about how little tax big business pays undermine any proposals for new or increased taxes on workers and the poor, or cuts to government spending. Every time Abbott or Hockey talk about the need to reform our tax system or cut social spending on workers and the poor, we now have a simple rejoinder—stop the cuts and tax the rich.

To read the whole article click here.

My article ‘Selfish corporate giants dodging all the tax they can’ will be published in Solidary magazine next week. You can subscribe to Solidarity magazine here.

Given that both Joe Hockey and Chris Jordan are possibly undermining the work of the Senate and this committee by not providing the names of the tax rorters, and supporting that decision, the question has to be asked: Are the Treasurer and the Commissioner of Taxation in contempt of the Senate and the Committee? If so, why aren’t their actions being investigated with a view to prosecution?

‘Nothing is off the agenda and your exciting ideas about taxing the rich should be part of the national conversation,’ Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey told me.

Given the widespread opposition to the 2014 Budget, the one percent have drawn an important lesson from that debacle – consult with the intended victims before launching attacks on poor people and workers. That is what the tax discussion paper is about. This Damascene conversion to talking to people begs the question – is a tax shit sandwich no longer a shit sandwich if it has consultation sprinkles on top? To ask the question is to answer it. The solution to the tax and budgetary dilemmas seems pretty clear. Tax the rich.

The outcome of neoliberal policy since 1983, when Hawke Labor began implementing it and laid out the red carpet for Howard and then Abbott, has been a massive shift in wealth in Australia from labour to capital. The process of neoliberal regulatory capture in tax policy and tax law has now, if Second Commissioner Mills’ speech is any indication, also successfully infected the administration of the Australian Tax Office. All the sweet words in the world will not disguise the fact that the fox is now in charge of the revenue hen house.