Latest Finance & Tax Stories

The Coalition won the 2013 federal election beating their chest about Labor’s “debt and deficit”. Thanks to COVID-19, we’re unlikely to see a surplus in our lifetime or our children’s. But, let’s not forget that the current debt blow-out occurred well before the coronavirus impacted the economy. Alan Austin checks how Australia shapes up against other OECD countries.

Mirvac, an $8 billion property juggernaut, is claiming the JobKeeker subsidy. Michael West reports on large corporations rorting taxpayers by pocketing their employees’ PAYG tax while avoiding their obligation to pay entitlements to workers they have sacked.

Canada has become the latest country to refuse pandemic bailout money for tax dodgers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joins leaders of Denmark, Poland and France in axing financial aid to corporations registered in offshore tax havens. Noel Turnbull reports.

The switch has been flicked from saving lives to saving money via a Josh Frydenberg press blitz today. The newspapers as one ran big on the same story. Get ready for “reform”

Just because Alan Joyce has a Masters degree in mathematics and Michael McCormack is one of two of Australian cabinet ministers who do not claim to have a tertiary education, does not mean Joyce got the better of McCormack in the latest airline subsidies negotiation

If this was the first time Australia’s cosseted superannuation sector found itself in a crisis-induced crunch, you could forgive the industry its current consternation. This is however starting to look like a replay of the Global Financial Crisis, little more than a decade ago. Worryingly, unless there is genuine reform, the next crisis will likely produce the same outcome. Harry Chemay reports.

Virgin Australia is pleading for a bail-out twice what its shares a worth. Its wealthy foreign shareholders can afford to pay. They’ve scampered. What is the answer? The answer lies in an Act of British Parliament, that is Section 51 of Australia’s Constitution. Michael West reports on a neat solution to a very untidy problem, the looming wave of defaults by large corporations.

Aren't the banks lovely to let their home loan customers take a six month break from mortgage repayments! Only one catch ... they are charging compound interest; interest on their interest. Michael West reports on the hardship of the banks versus the hardship of their...

Credit card rates are now up to 80 times higher than the Reserve Bank of Australia’s cash rate. Despite the coronavirus chaos and the banks swimming in an abundance of cheap credit, their credit card remain at all-time highs. Callum Foote reports.

The Morrison Government’s emergency measures to protect the economy are another massive subsidy from embattled taxpayers to Australia’s largest corporations. They are a failure of government to govern.

The Morrison government just bailed out Australia’s airlines with a $715 million relief package. This corporate welfare response is the harbinger of things to come

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg can kiss their cherished budget surplus goodbye. They never quite got there. Now we await their stimulus package, surely a more decisive affair than the bushfire response.Markets cratered around the world overnight on a 30 per cent...

Compare the pair. Thulasisi Sivapalan is Australia’s most prolific super fund investor. The PhD researcher from UTS tried to join 41 super funds just to get their financial statements. It was a tough journey; navigating mystified admin people, unhelpful regulators at APRA, even an abattoir. On a mission to find out how much tax super funds pay, Thulasisi discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in discrepancies between what Australia’s super funds were telling their investors and what they were reporting to APRA. Callum Foote reports on a peculiar road-trip.

ASIC investigates Westpac’s $2.5 billion capital raising, executed just before AUSTRAC’s lawsuit against the bank for 23 million breaches of money-laundering and terrorism-financing laws

The Australian Financial Review attacked Senator Rex Patrick this week after Patrick attacked Energy Australia chief Catherine Tanna, suggesting she step down from the board of the Reserve Bank for running a company whose tax haven structure helped it pay zero tax on $30 billion of income.

Which billionaires pay the most tax, and which pay the least?

Thanks to franking credits, the $52 billion in tax paid by Australia’s largest corporations is not actually received by the Tax Office