Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance and Tax Planning in Australia: The participation in mass-marketed tax avoidance schemes in the Pilbara region of Western Australia in the 1990s

This paper will examine the development of mass-marketed tax avoidance schemes in Australia. It will consider changes in approach to tax avoidance from the ‘bottom of the harbour’ schemes of the 1960s and 1970s to the mass-marketed tax avoidance schemes of the 1990s. It will examine the changing structure of tax avoidance from individually crafted tax avoidance structures designed by accountants and lawyers used by high wealth individuals to mass produced structures targeted at highly paid, and therefore highly taxed, blue collar workers in Australia’s mining industry in the 1990s. In the latter half of the twentieth century ‘unacceptable’ tax planning went from highly expensive, individually ‘tailor made’ structures afforded and used only by the very wealthy, to inexpensive replicated structures marketed to skilled and unskilled tradespeople and labourers. By 1998 over 42 000 Australian taxpayers were engaged in tax avoidance schemes with the highest proportion focussed in the mining regions of Western Australia. In the remote and inhospitable mining community of Pannawonica, which has one of the highest paid workforces in Australia, the Australian Taxation Office identified that as many as one in five taxpayers were engaged in a mass-marketed tax avoidance scheme. The paper will identify the causes of these changes, including the advent of the computerised information technology which permitted ‘mass production’ of business structures designed to exploit business incentives in the Australian taxation system in the 1990s. It will also set these developments within the broader context of the tax compliance culture prevailing in Australia and overseas during this period

Sydney in ferment : crime, dissent and official reaction, 1788 to 1973.

Crime fascinates many members of the public. They are eager to know what forms it takes, whether kinds of crime change, what measures are taken to combat it. Sydney in Ferment draws widely on primary sources, many previously unpublished. It focuses on trends in criminal behaviour, political dissidencc, collective violence and crime control polices in New South Wales from Phillip{u2019}s landing in 1788 to the early 1970s. It investigates variations in rates and types of crime and threats to public order and discusses changes in criminal law, the creation and development of police forces and trends in criminal procedure and penal form. Its conclusion on the relative weights to be given to the influence of short-term changes in policy on criminal justice and to fundamental social and economic factors will provoke spirited discussion. This book is a lively account both of crime itself and also of the changes in the moral attitudes of the officials and the public at large

The Multilateralization of Policing: The Case of Illicit Synthetic Drug Control

Many security-related roles that were customarily the responsibility of governments and public police agencies have become commercialized, devolved, or otherwise dispersed. This phenomenon has been described as 'multilateralization.' The paper sets out to analyse the multilateralization of policing as it applies to strategies of supply reduction in the area of illicit synthetic drugs, focusing in particular upon amphetamine type substances. Supply reduction can constitute interventions not ordinarily thought of as drug law enforcement and entail a range of technologies underpinned by regulatory theory. Various strategies of engaging external institutions in furtherance of reducing the supply of illicit synthetic drugs are canvassed. The authors provide an analytical framework for understanding how illicit synthetic drugs can be governed through strategies of co-production and the possible barriers and issues that need to be considered when attempting to engage the crime control capacities of external institutions