Bill F.
While Gillard and Swan are thrashing around complaining about the fall in tax revenue and their inability to provide decent services for the people, the rich and super-rich are pigging out at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.
Australia Tax Office statistics released in May show that at least 70 fat cats with income in excess of $1 million paid no income tax at all for the year 2010-11.
Even though they pulled in $194 million between them, their shifty taxation accountants and lawyers were able to prune their taxable income back by deducting $118 million worth of tax losses from previous years, plus $33 million in deductions for the same taxation advice. Other bits claimed included donations of $20 million to charities and $26 million in interest payments. Five shameless individuals even claimed the mature age tax offset for low income older workers!
The favourite device for this ‘totally legal and respectable’ tax evasion was negative gearing on hobby farms and rental apartments. In that year a total of 1.25 million taxpayers also used negative gearing to cut their taxable incomes by the order of $13 billion dollars, which translates to a loss of government revenue of around $5 billion. 2300 people with incomes each in excess of $100,000 paid no tax either, in spite of earning $652 million between them.
Not so legal and respectable is the secret transfer of millions of dollars out of the country to tax-free havens in places such as Singapore, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Cook Islands, not to mention the ‘discrete’ banks of Switzerland.
If the government was fair dinkum about collecting tax revenue to fund schools, hospitals, public transport and welfare services for the people, it would shut down the perks and loopholes and shift the main tax burden from the mass of workers and small producers onto the handful of greedy rich parasites.
But let’s face it. Whether Labor or Liberal, they’re all governments of capitalism. To expect them to really crack down on their wealthy backers is like seeing a booze bus outside the pub car park!
Your taxes at work – for the multinationals
And what happens to a good part of the billions of dollars in tax revenue squeezed from the working people through PAYE income tax, the GST, Medicare levy, etc.?
There is a host of concessions and rebates, investment incentives and tax offsets granted to mining and energy monopolies, and these have effectively nullified any of their obligations to pay more than a nominal amount of mining tax or carbon tax.
In addition, little known government agencies such as the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation (EFIC) are regularly doling out cheap loans to their mates in big business. One recent beneficiary of EFIC generosity was the US multinational Exxon Mobil which received $350 million to build a gas project in New Guinea.
The latest example is the partial funding of British multinational Rio Tinto’s $5.1 billion expansion plans for the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in Mongolia. How much, they won’t say, but it’s likely to be several hundred million dollars. More than half of the funding has already been secured, with the World Bank heavily involved – no doubt leaning on the Mongolian government to weaken any remaining environmental standards and labour protections. Also sniffing around for a slice of the action are local banks ANZ and NAB.
Taxing our patience
So when you’re filling out your tax return in a few weeks’ time, and finding it messy and complicated working out just what you are entitled to claim to avoid paying excess tax, you’d better be careful, in case you get hauled in for a ‘review’ – they always find something and there’s hefty fines attached for fudging the laundry bill or the tool allowance.
Imagine how complex it must be for the rich and powerful to avoid paying any tax at all! Better not. That might even lead to thinking that this unfair, rotten system has to be replaced with a better, fairer system that treats people equally and mobilises the wealth, resources and energy of the people for the collective good – socialism.
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