Birb Katter posted:

Un-ironically links to Labor Herald

quote:

As Joe Hockey exits parliament after two decades in opposition and government, we wish him well in his future endeavours. He is a big-hearted man, regarded on both sides of the political divide as a genuinely good guy. We agree. He is jovial and jolly. He dedicated himself to public service. His brief stewardship of the Treasury portfolio, however, was a failure. Indeed, when the history books examine the almost two-year Hockey treasurership, he will be seen as worse than Labor’s Wayne Swan.

In opposition, Mr Hockey predicted correctly that Mr Swan would never deliver a budget surplus. But Mr Hockey, like Mr Swan, also promised he would speedily return the budget to surplus. Not only did Mr Hockey never deliver a surplus, he made the bottom line worse. The accumulated budget deficit across the four years to 2017-18 surged from $60.2 billion in Mr Hockey’s first budget to $116.5bn in his second, and last, budget.

Despite promising to end “the age of entitlement”, Mr Hockey took government spending to almost unseen heights: 25.9 per cent of GDP estimated this year. Net government debt is forecast to peak at 18 per cent of GDP next year. His landmark 2012 speech pledging to wind back spending and wean voters off welfare was given exclusively to the ABC’s Lateline, which was never going to support such an agenda. In any event, he failed to sell the message to voters.

Mr Hockey did not master the art of politics, which was one reason he should never have been treasurer. Reducing stimulus while the resources boom was tapering off was never going to be easy; certainly Mr Swan failed to do this when it was needed in 2011-12. Mr Hockey’s 2014 budget strategy was poorly conceived and implemented. He did not prepare voters for the broken promises and tough measures needed after years of Labor profligacy. A $9bn payment to the Reserve Bank in 2013 was made without proper explanation. The Treasury had rarely taxed or spent as much as it did under him.

Mr Hockey did not live up to the benchmark set by the best postwar treasurers, Paul Keating and Peter Costello. Their policy expertise and political nous were fundamental to their ability to deliver significant economic reforms and budget surpluses. They were able to mesh the politics with the economics and wrap them in a narrative that made a compelling case to voters for reform. They also worked hard. They contributed significantly to the long prime ministerships of Bob Hawke and John Howard. Too often, Mr Hockey was missing in action. Days passed when he did not do an interview. He failed to lead and shape public debate to advance his agenda. He holidayed too often, and the country and his career suffered as a result. He was a large factor in Tony Abbott’s downfall.

Madonna King’s biography, Not Your Average Joe, revealed Mr Hockey long dreamt of being prime minister. Short of that goal, he wanted to be a reforming treasurer. But, in the end, he was a below average treasurer. And that is his sad legacy.

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

http://rationalradical.me/2015/12/real-estate-myths-are-being-destroyed-theres-never-been-a-worse-time-to-buy/

open24hours posted:

open24hours posted:

It seems like a pretty reasonable way to let China know we're not happy with their expansionist policies. If we don't do it now sooner or later we won't be able to do it at all.

open24hours posted:

It's not really disputed, even China isn't claiming ownership of it yet.

[Edit: I mean, they're not claiming ownership to the point where they're actually going to shoot down planes, and these kinds of operations help to prevent that.]

Birb Katter posted:

Lid posted:

It should be noted Jackson lost the appeal on a technical, and really loving obvious, procedural reason. Jackson never sought leave to appeal from the court let alone had it granted, which is a necessary requirement meaning her appeal was incompetant on first instance. Her husband should probably have told her.

quote:

Senior executives are bracing for the release of tax details for more than 1500 companies on Thursday, with the figures expected to show more than a third of large corporates paid no tax in 2014.
That's the aggregate figure for 2013, and the position was even worse for foreign companies operating in Australia, half of which had no taxable income last year, on revenue totalling $21 billion.
While the aggregate figures are no surprise, the Tax Transparency report that Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan will release on Thursday, for the first time, will identify how much tax individual companies pay.
But the selective information is confusing and companies may struggle to explain how the ATO numbers differ from their own reported tax payments.

Public attention inevitably wil fix on any discrepancies between Thursday's figures with statements that a string of major corporates including Google, Apple, BHP Billiton, News Corporation, Rio Tinto and Chevron made to the Senate tax inquiry earlier this year on how much tax they pay.
The data may include James Packer's companies, which would be regarded as foreign because the ownership through Cairnton Holdings is held by Bahamas companies, while Mr Packer himself recently moved to Israel.
But investors may battle to understand what the figures to be released on Thursday mean.

Two years of bitter political battles have produced a reporting regimen under which the ATO will detail total revenue, taxable income and tax paid for foreign owned corporates and Australian public companies with more than $100 million of sales.
The Tax Transparency report will provide no details of the quite legitimate reasons that most companies paid less than the statutory 30 per cent tax rate—and in some cases less than the amount reported in their accounts—and accounting firms are encouraging companies to be proactive in explaining their tax positions.

Preparations include seminars, one-on-one coaching and suggested question-and-answer briefings for senior executives to handle media inquiries.
Amendments that the government agreed to with the Greens on December 3 will extend the tax disclosures to Australian private companies with turnover of more than $200 million, but this information is not expected to be ready before March, when it will be released separately.
The delay is to enable the ATO to provide the private companies with the opportunity to comment on the figures to be released.

The challenge will be to understand how the figures that the ATO releases for international companies in particular relate to the special purpose accounts that they file with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
"Income tax expense is a vastly different amount to the total taxes paid," a spokeswoman for a major multinational told The Australian Financial Review earlier this year.
"An income tax expense is purely an accounting tax cost or expense for accounting purposes only."
Apple's Australian company reported income tax expense of $80.35 million in 2014, while its cashflow statement showed income tax paid as $101.1 million.

WHAT THE NUMBERS MEAN

Aggregate tax data published by the ATO for 2013 offers several different measures of revenue, and list "Taxable income", as well as "Taxable income (Calculation statement)".
The ATO also details "Tax on taxable income", "Gross tax", "Tax payable" and "Net tax". It appears that the cash tax paid is the net tax figure which will be supplied for each company.

To add to the confusion, the figures will be for tax consolidated entities or in some cases individual companies rather than what is the consolidated group under accounting principles.
BP's major holding company, BP Australia Investments, reported income tax expense of $84 million in 2014. But bizarrely, tax is consolidated in the previous holding company, BP Regional Australasia Holdings.
Xstrata until recently has held most of its mining investments in separate companies without an umbrella parent in Australia (though it has said it is moving to this model).

It's possible that not all of the separate companies reach the $100 million a year in revenue and thus would not be included in the report.
It may be possible for Australian large private companies to game the system by restructuring to ensure different taxable entities have less than the $200 million revenue cut-off. But the late Greens amendment covers the 2014 tax year, before any such moves would have been taken.
Foreign companies are defined as groups with a foreign ultimate holding company, though if the foreign shareholding is less than 50 per cent they will be regarded as private Australian companies and excluded from next week's list.

Cairnton Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of the Packer family's Cairnton Holdings, files accounts with ASIC under the category, "Small proprietary company that is controlled by a foreign company", suggesting that the entire group may be treated as foreign owned and thus caught by the Tax Transparency provisions.
The ATO has already published aggregate figures for corporate tax paid in 2013, which show that 2,840 non-resident companies of all sizes operating in Australia reported $42.3 billion in sales.
But 1,375 of these foreign companies—or nearly half—with total revenue of $21.2 billion, had a total taxable income of only $17.9 million and after other allowances each paid zero tax.

In comparison, 2,210 large and very large Australian companies (with revenue above $100 million and $250 million respectively) reported sales of $1.85 trillion, and taxable income of $168 billion.
Of these, 705 companies (almost a third) with revenue of $434 billion, had a taxable income of $5.7 billion. While this indicated tax payable of $1.7 billion, after various allowances none of these companies paid tax, and five of the very large firms were paid tax refunds totalling $1 million.
Australian resident companies carried less debt, with average debt/assets ratio of 31 per cent, against 56 per cent for foreign companies.

Birb Katter posted:

Birb Katter posted:

Wait, so she blew up her own appeal by being dumb?

quote:

She filed two appeals in October, arguing the primary judge should not have allowed the case against her to proceed.

She also claimed Labor leaders, including Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, had been working against her and that documents in the case had been destroyed, leaving "gaping holes" in the evidence.

But the HSU filed an objection to competency in both appeals and they were upheld by the court.

The HSU argued that Ms Jackson had no standing to bring the appeals as she was bankrupt.

It also claimed she had not sought or been granted leave to appeal, and in part of her appeal she had failed to specify the grounds on which she was appealing.

The court found these objections should be upheld and the appeal was dismissed as incompetent.

Birb Katter posted:

Halo14 posted:

http://www.afr.com/news/policy/tax/ato-prepares-to-reveal-tax-secrets-of-1500-companies-20151206-glgikw

ATO prepares to reveal tax secrets of 1500 companies

Oh it's been released in a searchable format:

http://www.afr.com/news/policy/interactive--ato-reveals-corporate-australias-tax-secrets-20151217-glpmsg

Doctor Spaceman posted:

and the audience slightly older.

MonoAus posted:

How does the audience effect the content of the program?

meteor9 posted:

What the crap is RTPDS and how do they only pay 0.0004% tax?

But yeah gotta crackdown on that loving thirty bux from that welfare 'cheat', of course.

hooman posted:

Holy poo poo, the company I work for paid 2% tax on its profit.

Amoeba102 posted:

They ask questions.

meteor9 posted:

What the crap is RTPDS

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Sorry, specifically the (studio) audience who asks questions.

MonoAus posted:

Of course, duh. For some reason I understood it as television audience and was thinking it was some criticism of the content of tweets or something.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Rio Tinto.

hooman posted:

Holy poo poo, the company I work for paid 2% tax on its profit.

open24hours posted:

If they were nationalised it'd just be the government siphoning off the money for their own purposes instead of a corporation.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Rio Tinto.

ScreamingLlama posted:

Latest MYEFO shows a backslide to Hockeynomics



If you're going to vote LNP next election, you may as well walk up to me in person and spit in my face.

quote:

Private pathology companies are competitive enough to absorb the costs of reduced bulk-billing incentives, but some patients will still be hit with increased charges, the federal health minister, Sussan Ley, has conceded.

Ley argued that the pathology industry was big enough not to have to pass on costs associated with the changes, saying it was “highly corporatised and highly competitive”.

But she said there may be a cost for some customers.

“It’s a matter of managing the business, managing the patients, charging those who can afford some, something,” she told Sky News.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

They did have some comments on Q & A too. Sadly the recommendation wasn't "don't".

quote:

Some Coalition MPs have questioned the appropriateness of Australia’s domestic spy chief phoning politicians with a request they use moderation in their language about Islam.

The director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Duncan Lewis, contacted a number of Coalition politicians to warn that robust comments risked becoming a danger to national security, the Australian newspaper reported.

Guardian Australia understands Lewis has been speaking about Asio’s heavy reliance on assistance from Muslim communities and the importance of language. He is believed to have provided a similar message in a briefing to premiers and chief ministers at the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Sydney last week.

The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, moved to head off the criticism of Lewis and suggested he was simply doing his job.

“If the director general of Asio has formed the view that a public debate in Australia has the potential to hamper the work that his organisation is undertaking in relation to counter-terrorism then of course it’s appropriate for him to speak out,” Bishop said.

But Queensland Liberal National party backbencher George Christensen, who has made forthright remarks about the “war against radical Islam”, said while he had not personally received a call he would be concerned if legitimate debate was being curtailed.

“Where do we draw the line with that? If we can’t say there’s a problem within Islam and it needs to be sorted out by the moderate Islamic leadership and that is somehow anathema and will cause national security issues, well goodness me, where do we stop next,” Christensen told Guardian Australia.

Western Australian Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen also raised free speech concerns. “To say something is off limits and should not be discussed is extremely anti-democratic,” he told the Australian. “It’s really a slippery slope.”

Tasmanian Liberal MP Andrew Nikolic told the same newspaper he understood why Lewis and security agencies wanted to ensure their ability to do their job. “But the comments of myself and others that I have seen have not criticised Islam but those who seek to hijack and misrepresent Islam,” he said.

Malcolm Turnbull has sought to recast the national security debate by emphasising mutual respect and describing Muslims as “our best allies in the battle against terrorism”. The prime minister has said that all of his public comments about Islam were “carefully calculated” to reflect advice from Asio and the Australian federal police.

Turnbull’s predecessor, Tony Abbott, last week called for reform within Islam, saying the religion had never undergone its version of a reformation and not all cultures were equal. Other Coalition MPs have made forthright comments about Islam, prompting the assistant minister for multicultural affairs, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, to caution against “simplistic” calls and “megaphone politics”.

The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said Lewis was “a distinguished public servant” and the Liberal party should be ashamed of itself for dragging him “into their own internal spat”.

Lewis had not done anything wrong by reinforcing long-standing warnings from police and security agencies that divisive rhetoric about Islam was counterproductive, Dreyfus said.

The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, said Turnbull should show leadership and “rein into line the far-right wing of his political party and not leave it to our security agencies”.

“Our security agencies’ time is better spent catching terrorists and preventing crime than having to ring up recalcitrant Liberal backbenchers to explain to them the basics,” Shorten said.

The Greens senator Nick McKim said Lewis was “quite right to point out that fuelling a backlash against Muslims makes it harder for Asio to do its job”.

Asio declined to comment on the phone calls on Thursday, but Lewis went public with his concerns about language in an interview with News Corp tabloids published last Sunday. Asio depended on a “very good” level of cooperation and information from Muslim communities in order to protect national security, Lewis said. A backlash within the communities would be “very, very dangerous”.

“We need to be very temperate and we need to be smart as a community,” Lewis told News Corp. “This problem is solvable. But we need to be smart.”

Lewis is not regarded as partisan. He had a 33-year career in the military, including commanding the SAS and overseeing forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, before serving in senior public service positions under both sides of politics.

He was appointed to a national security role in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet under John Howard in 2005, was named as national security adviser under Kevin Rudd in 2008, and became secretary of the Department of Defence under Julia Gillard in 2011. The Abbott government named him as the director general of security with responsibility for Asio last year.

The former Asio chief, David Irvine, also warned against blaming all Muslims “for the sins of a tiny minority”. In a speech last year, Irvine said the strongest defence against violent extremism was within the Australian Muslim communities.

katlington posted:

But Queensland Liberal National party backbencher George Christensen, who has made forthright remarks about the “war against radical Islam”, said while he had not personally received a call he would be concerned if legitimate debate was being curtailed.

open24hours posted:

If they were nationalised it'd just be the government siphoning off the money for their own purposes instead of a corporation.

Mr Chips posted:

What's the relationship between the two? If you sort the AFR list by income, Rio Tinto Ltd is just below RTPDS, and Rio Tinto Ltd is supposed to have paid 3.05B tax on 10.705B income. RTPDS' ABN is 21099346899, but I don't have access to the paid ASIC results.