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Tag: Murdoch

24/04/2022

Huge Corporate Rort with Petroleum Resource Rent Tax

24 April 2022

Foreign companies are paying no tax due to deficiencies in the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT). You may recall that the Rudd government tried to bring in a realistic tax based on the one that they have in Norway with a sovereign wealth fund set up to tide the country over a rainy day (like a COVID epidemic perhaps). The extent of the tax avoided is currently 13% of GDP!

Rudd was targeted by a combination of the miners and Murdoch, who he was trying to stop getting a virtual monopoly of the Australian media.

When Rudd fell, Gillard came in and introduced an alternative tax, which allowed her to save face, but one commentator some time later noted that the increase in miners’ profits that year was almost exactly what Rudd’s tax would have raised, and the new tax raised almost nothing. It was also said that the Tax Office had not modelled the new tax, and it came from the miners. This fits the theory that it was a face-saver so that Australians would still think that the government was actually in control.

Here we are a few years later, with a whole election debate is about tax, tax cuts, handouts and the cost of living, yet neither of the major parties have the guts to call out the real tax avoiders, who actually changed the legislation in their favour. The Greens do and for that they are called radical lefties!

The government takes credit for the COVID bounce-back recovery, which has nothing to do with their policies, and for the low unemployment rate which relates to the lack of backpackers and students, who usually do the dirtiest and least safe jobs for sub-award wages, not to mention the definition of ‘employment‘ as having at least one hour of work a week. The claimed 4% unemployment rate is actually a bad joke.

Here is an article in Crikey from Bernard Keane:

www.crikey.com.au/2022/04/20/prrt-could-be-biggest-theft-in-history/

15/01/2021

Big Tech’s Media Monopoly 15/1/21

Google and Facebook are taking most of the advertising revenue, which is naturally undermining Murdoch as the biggest player in conventional mass media.

The question is how much money are they making? They can transfer money around and avoid tax, but if how much they are making is opaque, they cannot even be taxed properly on turnover.

Australia is leading the world in wanting to tax google to pay for other media that produce content. Who will be the main beneficiary of this? Murdoch; of course. So actually the Australian government is doing Murdoch’s bidding. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. We are having an inquiry into Murdoch’s power on one hand, and passing special laws to give him money on the other.

The key problem is that the media funding model is broken. Years ago media proprietors were willing to keep editorial and advertising departments separate. No more. At first we found there were fewer stories about smoking caused disease in the women’s magazines that took the advertising. Then we noticed that Murdoch’s coverage of Indonesia and China were slanted when he was trying to buy satellites or networks. Naturally his companies were well reported in his newspapers, then there was cross-promotion of his other businesses. So as well as restricting content critical of advertisers things progressed to having stories slanted to be more exciting rather than more accurate or relevant.

Now, as social media eats away at conventional media advertising revenue they sack journalists to save money and delete or slant stories even more.

Simply funding good people to produce news is what has been done with the ABC on the BBC model, and this is what should happen. But the current government wants to manage the media and so want to de-fund the ABC.

So while I favour simply taxing google on its income and using the money to fund the ABC there are a number of problems with this. Who will or can make google disclose how much money it makes and where? An international cooperative of taxation departments empowered to send in IT-savvy forensic accountants? Can governments ever be trusted to fund public media adequately and then not interfere in what they report?

www.crikey.com.au/2021/01/15/google-facebook-ad-regulation/?utm_campaign=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

Written 15/1/21

01/05/2020

The Murdoch Party

1 May 2020 Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd do not agree on much, but both Malcolm and Kevin agree that Rupert Murdoch is effectively a political party in Australia and by controlling information gets whatever government and policies that he wants.Kevin Rudd may have been a religious, egotistical, micro-managing nerd, but probably what brought him […]