Tax avoidance, or the use of legal arrangements to reduce tax, is rife. According to the Australian Tax Office (ATO), Australian companies in 2012 sent almost A$60 billion to related parties in tax havens…
- Tutor, University of Wollongong
Treasurer Joe Hockey today urged G20 finance ministers to focus on ending gaps between Australian and overseas taxation arrangements that are eroding the tax base. He told an Institute of International…
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. TS Eliot, The Hollow Men The Labor government’s attack on universities to fund…
Treasurer Wayne Swan today announced that the mining tax had raised $126 million in the six months following its introduction, well below the $2 billion the government had expected it to yield this financial…
It says much about the degeneration of the Australian Labor Party that its priority and target for budget “savings” is poor single mums. In order to save an estimated $723 million over four years, in January…
It might well have been a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, but on the very day I had an article in The Conversation called Giant profits, tiny tax bills: time to close loopholes on corporate…
For many companies, tax is a cost of business rather than the price we pay for civilised society. The driver for tax minimisation or even avoidance is clear: the less tax business pays, the more profit…
On November 6, US voters will make a choice between two very different candidates with very different visions, policies and approaches. Well, that is the official version, at least. The reality is rather…
There is almost unanimous agreement among mainstream economists, tax experts, Treasury, business and even politicians (albeit very quietly) that the Goods and Services Tax will have to be increased and…
Federal Labor’s mining profits tax was originally designed to be a redistributive measure from a very profitable section of capital to all of capital through company tax cuts. The mini-me Mineral Resources…
The introduction of the Minerals Resource Rent Tax into federal parliament marks the next step in Labor’s neoliberal tax reform agenda. Another example, the carbon tax, is poised to pass through the Senate…
There is a contradiction at the heart of tax reform. Timid governments, worried about a voter backlash, do too little, too late. Yet in the medium to long term, major structural changes in the economy…
Sometimes an historian will challenge one of the key ideological myths of Australian capitalism. Henry Reynolds does it in his work on the colonial treatment of Aborigines, a treatment some go so far as…
The carbon tax is short-term carrot and long-term stick. The Coalition’s campaign against “a great big new tax” drove Gillard to introduce a tax for which most people and businesses affected will be compensated…
Solar panel payments are much in the news of late. NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell has backed down on retrospectively cutting the solar panel payment from 60 cents per kilowatt hour to 40 cents per kilowatt…
Now that Gina Rinehart has more than doubled her fortune in one year to top the 2011 BRW Rich 200 list, she will no doubt see her contribution to last year’s $22 million campaign to stop Labor’s resources…
Under the cover of last week’s budget splash, the Federal Government has quietly changed tax laws which currently allow students and potentially jobseekers to claim a deduction for expenses against government…
Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey shocked the mainly conservative tax world when he told a gathering of accountants last week that consideration should be given to taxing trusts as companies. A day later he…
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