Ned K.
(Above: Glencore miners)
The link below is worth reading for a case study of how multinational corporations are bleeding the public purse by tax evasion, price and profit transferring.
The coal mining giant corporation Glencore pays no tax according to the Sydney Morning Herald article in the link below. Glencore, with its head office in Switzerland, is now one of the biggest coal producers in the world, after the takeover of Xstrata in May last year.
Westfield, the biggest corporation in the retail shopping centre sector in Australia is not far behind Glencoe, paying less than 5% tax rate when the average (too low) corporate tax rate in Australia in real terms is 22%.
The Australia Institute has also revealed that state governments have heavily subsidised the mining industry corporations to the tune of billions of dollars all up.
Richard Denniss, the Director of The Australia Institute claimed last year, “If we’d (meaning the then Labor Government) done nothing more radical than leave the tax rates unchanged from 2006, if Howard didn’t do his last year and Rudd hadn’t done his first year’s tax cuts, then since 2006 we would have collected another $170 billion. We gave away $170 billion in tax cuts, and the top 10% of income earners got more than the bottom 80% combined.”
The attack on the people’s standard of living by the Abbott Government’s 2014 Budget is an intensification of a taxation policy trend accelerated by Howard and Rudd whereby the wealthiest corporations and executives bleed the public purse.
Taxation policy and government budgets are very much a class question.
Since Rudd’s retreat from the 40% resource tax on big mining corporations, there has been a massive transfer of wealth through government subservience to big corporations, most of whom are foreign owned like Glencoe.
This is what is behind the attacks on the people by the government in the latest federal budget. The only need for austerity is austerity on maximising profits! However this goes to the heart of what drives the system, maximising profits and accumulating private capital.
Just what lengths the political servants of the big corporations are prepared to go to serve the latter’s interests was demonstrated in late June this year by Liberal Senator and Employment Minister Abetz.
The Senate passed a Bill to preserve government guidelines for contractors hired to clean commonwealth government buildings. The guidelines came about because of the cleaners’ union Clean Start campaign which pressured the previous Labor Government to ensure that cleaners in these government buildings continued to be paid above award rates of pay and conditions.
While the Bill was being tabled in the Senate, Abetz was secretly signing away the guidelines by administrative decree!
David O’Byrne in a press release for the cleaners’ union United Voice said, “This makes a mockery of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s statement in Parliament on 16 June when he said, ‘I want to make it absolutely crystal clear that no cleaner’s pay is reduced’”
As is demonstrated by the large turn-outs to Bust The Budget and March Australia rallie
There is a mood for a change in direction of this country, and exciting years of struggle lie ahead as the people shape the country’s destiny through their own struggles.
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