While attempting to help my son complete his first tax return, I made a number of interesting discoveries. First, I discovered that none of his information worked and so I decided that we’d go to the Post Office and do it the old-fashioned way with a pen and paper.
“These things are awesome,” I told him. “They work almost every time and if you find that the pen doesn’t work they’re very easy to replace.” He attempted to argue that my concern about things on-line was coloured by the fact that much of my dealings with online things has been through government websites, which he dared to suggest weren’t as efficient as they should be. He brought up the Census, the NBN and one or two other things which he said just didn’t happen with companies who were run by people who actually understood computers.
“Nonsense,” I told him. “The government is run by Malcolm Turnbull. And he practically invented the Internet in Australia.”
“How do you ‘practically invent’ something that’s already invented?” he wanted to know. “If it’s already invented then to claim that you created it is just intellectual theft!”
“In Australia,” I told him. “That’s like when Hollywood takes a film from another country and gives it best screenplay when they remake the whole thing with a happy ending. Besides he didn’t make the claim Tony Abbott did. People don’t like it when you go around telling them how good you are.”
“Is that why the Liberals are so far down in the polls?”
He’s at university now, so I blame that for his disrespectful attitude to the government…
Anyway, imagine my chagrin when the woman at the Post Office told me that they didn’t have any forms and we’d have to do it online.
My son told me not to worry because we could do it by getting a link; he just hadn’t mentioned this before because I was so excited about the whole pen and paper thing and he thought that it was good to get me out of the house.
Well, we tried using the link and I discovered that the Tax Office was off-line for “scheduled maintenance”.
“Bloody silly time for scheduled maintenance!” I said. “Couldn’t they have done it a few weeks ago when people weren’t trying to do their tax?”
“The Liberals are in charge, Dad,” he reminded me. “Do you expect things to work properly?”
“But they’re really good at running things. They told us all through the Rudd and Gillard years how they would make Australia work again.”
“Isn’t Tony using that as a slogan in his re-election campaign? And doesn’t that suggest that it hasn’t been working for the past few years?”
“No, when Tony uses it, he’s talking about getting people off the dole and back to work because we can’t have people lying around doing nothing unless they’re over the age of seventy and on the pension. Besides it’s not an election campaign. The election’s not for a couple of years.”
“I meant, Tony’s ‘re-elect me leader or I’ll screw Turnbull every chance I get’ election campaign!”
Well, my son owes me an apology because the timing of the scheduled maintenance wasn’t chosen by the government. It wasn’t even chosen by the tax office. It was the sort of scheduled maintenance you do when you suddenly discover that something isn’t working and you say, “Mm, we need to schedule maintenance in the next few minutes because the whole system has shut down.” Exactly like Census night when all these people tried to do the Census on the same day and the system shut down.
In searching for the article to show my son, I discovered that the ATO had also suffered outages in December, February and June, and, as the spokesperson explained, these were unusual and that the difficulty was that so many people were trying to do their tax because we have so many people in the country and only one Tax Office so it was hard for the system to handle a lot of people giving further weight to Tony Abbott’s argument that we should cut immigration.
But before I found the article about the outages, I also discovered something rather interesting in the Australian Financial Review;
Mr Jordan said the ATO was shifting its focus away from multinationals to the cash economy and rorting of claims by individuals and small businesses. Officials have been working on an estimate for the “tax gap” for multinationals. That is, the difference between the tax that should be paid and what is actually paid.
Mr Jordan said the figure was likely to be around $2.5 billion, which was far from the that $50 billion “some people have thrown around”.
Gee, I wonder if Mr Turnbull knows, because in his list of achievements he listed: “Cracking down on multinational tax avoidance to ensure companies that make money in Australia pay tax in Australia”, and he didn’t have cracking down on individuals and small businesses. In fact, the only mention of small businesses was “Landmark reform of Australia’s competition law – to help small to medium companies compete with big business.
The final thing I discovered was to do with my son’s super fund. Even though he only has a part-time job and has only earned a minimal amount of money, he still had a range of insurances automatically taken out on his behalf. While I can see the desirability of everyone having Death and Permanent Disability insurance, it seems rather strange that Income Protection insurance would be taken out for a casual worker when they have no regular income to protect and consequently wouldn’t be able to claim anyway.
Perhaps there needs to be a long hard look at the Superannuation Industry and the obligation should be that they act in the interest of the person. Oh wait, that’s what Labor wanted to do and so therefore there must be something wrong with it!
