Announcing the Scam of the Year awards in Australian business and politics. What an embarrassment of rorting riches it is. Michael West with the countdown of elite scams, the creme de la creme, unvarnished, what you will not read in fossil media.
Coming in at number nine is fossil fuel freebies
It went largely unnoticed, save in the fossil business press where they were in their usual fossil marketing and PR mode – but how about the – astounding – call for public subsidies for coal and gas corporations from people now making record profits?
Following official forecasts by the regulator AEMO which showed electricity prices were finally coming down and Australia’s coal plants would close five years earlier than expected, gas and coal lobby groups, spearheaded by tax haven operator Energy Australia, were fast out of the blocks demanding subsidies they framed as “government backed strategic reserves of coal power”.
“If you don’t give us hand-outs, you’ll get black-outs” was the spiel, made even more brazen by the fact that most of the major players are foreign multinationals pillaging Australia’s natural resources without paying much (Top 40 Tax Dodgers here) if any corporate income tax.
In fact, this sector is the worst tax tipper-innerer of all, dollar-for-dollar earned. Think Exxon (US), Peabody (US), Jemena (Singapore/China), EnergyAustralia (Hong Kong), Glencore (Switzerland), Santos, Chevron (US) and Shell (Anglo/Dutch).
Eight: Population Ponzi Scheme
Amid the cost of living crisis, a dearth of housing, and calls by the Opposition and its town criers that armadas of boat people were coming to get us, the govt finally moved to curtail immigration. The scam is that this “dramatic” move, as it was marketed by the government, was staggered until after the election, and the proposed cuts are too little in light of available housing and infrastructure.
Without migration, the economy would be flat to dead. Migration is good, this country is all about migration. Yet excessive migration – The Population Ponzi Scheme – is a scam by big business and politicians as it makes their growth numbers look good. It means cheap labour for business and higher GDP figures for government.
It’s also a scam that delivers for the rich over the poor as asset prices such as property go up, as do rents. Everything is settings, analysis, research on migration process, where is academia? Oh, wait, academia has been corporatised too. Shucks, we will have to rely on independent expert reports.
Seven: the Federal Opposition
While the government has hardly knocked the lights out, just the dimmer, the alternative Coalition regime is a case of Hobson’s Choice. Amid a total void in policy, the Opposition has embraced its proven tactics of fear-mongering and just says ‘no’ to anything the government does.
The scam is to get back into power with the support of a friendly corporate media willing to amplify Peter Dutton’s fear-mongering. Strong leadership, que? Nuclear power looks like a policy and sounds like a policy but it’s not officially a policy as they know it is too expensive, would be built too late for the energy transition, and is therefore not commercially viable.
Otherwise, there would be proposals by multinationals to finance nuclear plants, which there are not. So this scam is a political distraction designed to keep fossil fuels selling.
Dutton’s Nuclear Folly: Small Modular Reactors a political mirage
Six: The Voice
Which brings us to the Voice and the aptly named No Vote. The No Vote campaign got up with its slogan, “If you don’t know, vote No!”. Classic fear-mongering won the day and the Government’s political capital was poured on the floor as lies were peddled about public funding for a ginormous bureaucracy and indigenous people coming to steal our things.
If you “don’t know”, you can always open a browser, do some reading, and bloody well find out.
But no, No won despite the proposal really just being for a few words in the Constitution to recognise First Nations people, and Parliament to do the rest, set up the Voice as an advisory body with no legislative powers whatsoever. Sad for this country.
Five: gutting the Australian share market
Foreign takeover predators have been out in style again this year, reducing the number of big companies in which to invest on the ASX.
In recent days there has been a takeover bid for drilling group Boart Longyear by another US private equity mob. Along with the takeovers of Australia’s biggest gold miner Newcrest by US giant Newmont, and bids for Link, Blackmores and a raft of others – and let’s not forget the merger talks between Woodside and Santos or the Chemist Warehouse backdoor-listing into Sigma – big business keeps getting bigger, more concentrated, and more foreign-owned.
Why are there so many foreign financial players buying marquee Australian companies? Prices for goods and services are high in this country as competition is relatively low. Also, tax is a thing. At 30c in the dollar, there are big savings to be made in restructuring and moving control offshore so as not to pay corporate income tax for years.
The scam is that it makes foreign foreign corporations more competitive than local companies when it comes to takeovers.
Good thing for the ATO, the $20b bid by tax dodger Brookfield for Origin Energy failed as Brookfield’s last two takeover outings ended up with the Aveo publicly subsidised nursing home group being controlled in Bermuda and Healthscope’s 41 private hospitals being owned in the Cayman Islands.
Four: AUKUS submarines boondoggle
Slammed as the ‘worst deal in history’ by Paul Keating, AUKUS was originally a Scomo scam, embraced by Albo with 24 hours to decide whether it was worth getting wedged on national security or backing our noble allies. So, after a decade of neglect and botched defence spending, suddenly we are on the hook for $380b for submarines which won’t be delivered for years. A noble price.
But cui bono? We have signed up – not just to pay for the rebuilding of US and UK shipyards – but to fly foreign defence officials around on procurement junkets, dispose of US and UK low-level nuclear waste in Australia and hand over our sovereignty to the US by giving them their own military bases in this country.
Join our Team! AUKUS foreign expenditure sinkhole blows out to $12B … already
Three: Israel’s self-defence and the ‘global fools-based order’
If AUKUS is a majestic scam on Australia by the US, Israel’s psychotic Benjamin Netanyahu, he on fraud charges who previously sponsored Hamas and who cites Old Testament genocide passages (Amakek), has emphatically held forth, “hold my beer, I’ll scam the whole world.”
I’ll show how to do a Genocide while claiming that you, Israel, are the victim, says Ben. So it is that we saw the “babies beheaded scam”, babies in ovens, babies hung on clotheslines, unsubstantiated mass rapes, and overcooked victim numbers from Hamas’ October 7 attacks.
And the world now teeters on the brink of WW3, with 21,000 Palestinians massacred in Gaza, and counting live, 10,00 of them children, and the oil price is sky-high as the Houthis rabble shipping in the Red Sea, driving inflation and hammering seaborne world trade through the Suez canal.
It’s an epic own goal by Genocide Joe and Butcher Benjamin and his bloodthirsty cronies as antisemitism is rampant, Islamaphobia too, and goodwill for Israel has vanished in 3 months. American prestige is shot and China and Russia are looking more reasonable than ‘our friends’.
Australian authorities, along with their patsies in the corporate media, continue to swallow whole the Zionist propaganda of Israel’s ‘self-defence’ hook, line and sinker – along with our excuse of adhering to whatever is this ‘global rules-based order’ – which has sunk their credibility lower, even lower.
Two: who else but Qantas!
Good old Qantas; they rope in $2.5b in Covid subsidies with no strings attached, get belted by not just the Federal Court but by the High Court too for illegally sacking 100s of workers, then it emerges – after chief Alan Joyce sold his personal Qantas stock at high prices – that they had been flogging tickets to their customers for flights which didn’t exist.
Eight thousand of them, tickets that are – one heck of a yield play, or call it old-fashioned … fraud.
When busted by the ACCC for this prodigious Ghost Flights scam on customers, they claimed they were not actually in the business of selling flights on aeroplanes. Not on your nelly, no, what customers were actually buying, they said, was a ‘bundle of rights’ to their flights. They were buying a concept, not a travel service, declared Qantas.
The Mangy Roo, therefore, became the symbol of what is wrong with corporations and their increasing power over governments. A shibboleth, a symbol for our times of latter-day neo-liberalism.
If the GFC bailed out the banks, by the time Covid and the JobKeeper corporate welfare orgy bobbed along it became evident that there was no free market, just corporations getting what they could out of the government and the public purse.
Where are the academics, oh they have been corporatised too (we can’t even fit academia into our top nine as their view outside the science field no longer matters)?
Qantas should never have been privatised in the first place; it’s just a sinkhole for public money and private greed. In the end, it was not just taxpayers, workers and customers getting dudded but even, heaven forbid, shareholders, too.
One: PwC and the Big 4
Which brings us to PwC and the Big4 – a scam which finally began to unravel after so many years (prediction which was the first story on this website here).
Here we have 4 firms notching up double-digit revenue growth for years after conning governments that they were experts on everything, effectively outsourcing the public service to consultants, skiving about inside almost every large corporation as either auditors, tax dodging advisers or consultants, or both, or all three. No conflict of interest there!
They were on a glorious wicket but then PwC gets busted for treason. It began with a ban for a tax adviser by a mob nobody had ever heard of, the Tax Practitioners Board, and it snowballed from there as dozens of PwC partners were embroiled in the scandal, the firm confidentially advising government about tax laws then flogging that secret information to its multinational clients.
The cover-up was worse than the crime. The partners got together and tried to blame it on one rogue adviser, and a few months later, they were before the Senate getting grilled, and their foreign overlords moved swiftly to protect the brand – after all, this whole caper is just a brand scam. It is a scam that syphons billions out of governments for giving them advice they rarely need while advising corporations on how to dud the government on the tax front.
So they sold off their government advice business, a billion dollars in revenue, for just one dollar. They also conducted the obligatory and inevitable ‘independent inquiry’ into the affair, or the whitewash as it is seen, commissioning not one but three independent inquiries, only one of which has seen the light of day.
That was the Ziggy Switkowski report where Ziggy was not permitted to view the actual documentary materials but only a PwC sanitised tranche of material.
The Big 4 scam had to unravel at some point, and this was the year when fortunes turned for the Accountants of Fortune. Trust us bro, the Big4 had it too good for too long.
And so our Scam of the Year award goes to PwC and the Big4. It has been an epic scam. But no scam lasts forever.
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.