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You start to worry that democracy in Victoria is under threat.

It’s one thing for government to impose curfews, massive lockdowns and other freedom-limiting activity based on best available medical advice. But it’s entirely different to use the Covid-19 health crisis as a cover to target a political agenda unrelated to health issues.

That is, creeping authoritarian totalitarianism is rearing its nasty head in Victoria.  More...

Yesterday the Victorian Labor government released its report into the ‘gig economy.’ The 228-page report should be read as a declaration of war against self-employed, small business people across Victoria, and Australia. This is so because a key recommendation calls for laws that would effectively make self-employment illegal.  More...

Since the Global Financial Crisis, unemployment has dropped to low levels in most of the developed world at least. That’s fantastic. It needs to continue.

One of the important factors in this positive trend seems to be the evolution of work arrangements that enable quick responses to fast-moving markets and consumers. Flexible work creates work! But this gets regulation-lovers worried. They reckon that if work isn’t controlled through government regulation, there’s got to be something wrong. Currently their focus is on the so-called ‘gig’ economy. Apparently, it’s a big ‘problem’ that needs a solution.  More...

Earlier this week we discussed the history of Uber in its global legal battles to have its drivers accepted as independent contractors. The Uber battle is at the forefront of the gig ‘question’.

Today we focus on the Australian Taxation Office and its incompetence (from our experience) in assessing employee vs independent contractor status. The ATO should learn from a significant Uber legal decision in Australia. It probably won’t though More...

Earlier this month the Fair Work Ombudsman released a statement that, after a two-year investigation, it has concluded that drivers working through Uber are not employees.

The Transport Workers Union described the decision as ‘…devastating for workers in the gig economy’. One academic said the decision was ‘very disappointing’.  More...

You might recall the campaign hullaballoo we generated in late 2017 when the ATO cancelled the ABNs of 16 low-income, work-from-home, self-employed women. The ATO ‘assessed’ the women as employees. The denial of ABNs destroyed their incomes and forced many on to welfare. After 13 weeks of intense campaigning, the ATO ‘temporarily’ reinstated their ABNs.

The weird thing about this situation was that when we asked if any of the women were not paying their required tax, the ATO replied that it didn’t know. We checked and verified that all the women were paying tax as required. The ATO’s job is to collect tax. But in this case the ATO didn’t care about tax compliance. We discovered another agenda. We confirmed that powerful forces in the ATO are obsessed with the thought that there is something wrong about self-employed people. The ATO seeks to stop people being contractors whether or not tax compliance is occurring. This is the ATO acting well outside of its remit.  More...

We recently discussed the re-emerging campaign against self-employment being cooked up principally by unions and the Labor ‘left’. We’ve seen this over many decades and this time the ‘evil’ is the gig economy. More...

According to demographer Bernard Salt, there’s a big cultural shift in Australia towards being your own boss. And it’s a lifestyle thing. In The Australian Bernard referred to: More...

Goodness. We had lots of people respond to our last news alert of (boring) summer tax reading. Large numbers of people downloaded our December submissions to Parliamentary and Treasury reviews of the Australian Taxation Office.

So we thought we’d enliven your summer reading even more! This time it’s the submission we made to Treasury in its review of Australian Business Numbers.

Over the last few years the ATO has been aggressively denying individuals access to ABNs and cancelling ABNs. There’s been an attitude that many people are not really running small businesses. The ATO reckons that it can identify a ‘real’ business from a ‘sham’ business.  More...

We trust the Xmas pudding and New Year champers have worked through your system and you now feel suitably relaxed as the new business year slowly winds back up.

If you’re after some ‘exciting’ tax reading (yawn!), we had bit of a flurry of submissions we needed to get to the government and parliament before Christmas. Here are a couple of them. More...