As Australian Treasurer goes all gung-ho on planned company tax cuts it is wise to consider just what the country's international tax ranking is right now

While Federal Treasurer and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison is waxing lyrical about Trump’s tax cuts in the US and those Turnbull Government planned company tax cuts, it might be a good idea to see where Australia is positioned with regard to its international tax ranking.

According to the US Tax Foundation's Center for Federal Tax Policy Australia has an overall ranking as the 7^th best among OECD countries and 25^th out of a field of 35 when it comes to company tax rates.

Even with current changes to the US tax system it is hard to see the US suddenly coming from 30^th place to 6^th place or better and so become more competitive than Australia already when it comes to taxation generally.

2017 Tax Competiveness Rankings

Country	Overall Rank	Overall Score	Corporate Tax Rank	Consumption Taxes Rank	Property Taxes Rank	Individual Taxes Rank	International Tax Rules Rank
Estonia	1	100.0	1	10	1	7	7
New Zealand	2	88.7	18	7	3	1	15
Switzerland	3	85.2	7	1	33	4	9
Latvia	4	85.0	2	27	7	6	5
Luxembourg	5	82.7	26	5	18	13	2
Sweden	6	81.8	6	11	6	22	8
Australia	7	78.9	25	6	5	11	17
Netherlands	8	77.5	19	14	24	14	1
Czech Republic	9	74.3	8	32	10	3	10
Slovak Republic	10	74.1	10	31	2	5	27
Turkey	11	73.7	15	25	17	2	11
Korea	12	71.8	20	3	27	8	31
Austria	13	71.3	16	12	9	33	6
United Kingdom	14	70.8	17	17	31	18	3
Norway	15	70.7	14	23	16	10	14
Ireland	16	70.4	4	24	12	23	20
Canada	17	69.1	21	8	23	17	22
Slovenia	18	68.2	9	26	15	16	16
Finland	19	68.2	5	16	19	28	21
Hungary	20	67.0	3	35	26	24	4
Denmark	21	67.0	13	21	8	30	23
Japan	22	66.8	34	2	28	26	25
Germany	23	66.6	23	13	13	32	12
Iceland	24	63.5	12	22	22	31	19
Mexico	25	62.2	31	19	4	9	35
Israel	26	61.5	29	9	11	27	32
Belgium	27	60.3	30	33	25	12	13
Spain	28	59.8	27	15	32	21	18
Greece	29	57.2	24	28	21	15	30
United States	30	55.1	35	4	29	25	33
Poland	31	54.4	11	34	30	20	29
Chile	32	53.1	22	29	14	19	34
Portugal	33	51.9	32	30	20	29	28
Italy	34	47.7	28	20	34	34	26
France	35	43.4	33	18	35	35	24
Table 1. 2017 International Tax Competitiveness Index Rankings

The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index 2017–2018 Rankings places Australia in 21^st overall position in a field of 137 countries, with the US ranking 1^st.

Interestingly the WEF Executive Opinion Survey 2017 (12,400 company executives across 136 countries) cites the top global risks of concern to business by order of importance as:

High unemployment

Fiscal crises

National governance failure

Energy price shock

Social instability

Financial institution failure

Critical infrastructure shortfall

Large cyber attacks

Interstate/regional conflict Terrorist attacks

In relation to Australia by order of importance the top risks of concern to business were:

Energy price shock

Asset bubble

Large cyber attacks

High unemployment

Critical infrastructure shortfall

Climate change adaptation

The absence of any mention of tax rates is rather telling given the respondent pool.

The thirty-eight minutes in which Hawaii thought Trump had finally pushed North Korea too far

The New Yorker, 13 January 2018:

Residents of Hawaii received this warning on their smartphone screens 

Saturday morning from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

Photograph Caleb Jones / AP

A little after 8 a.m. today, Hawaii standard time, an alert was sent to cell phones in Hawaii: “ballistic missile threat inbound to hawaii. seek immediate shelter. this is not a drill.” The message was also broadcast on local television and radio.

Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.” Later, the governor of Hawaii, David Ige, told CNN, “It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button.”……

Our apartment looks out over the international airport and Pearl Harbor. Whenever there’s fighter-jet activity, it goes right by our lanai. There’s been a lot of exercises recently. The local news has been reporting why so many fighter jets are running around, and the stories described the name of the exercises: Sunset Aloha. Apparently, they’re military drills. What it meant, for us, is F-22s and F-35s have been screaming through the skies over the past two weeks.

“We were sitting out on the lanai when the announcement came over the building speaker that there was an inbound ballistic missile to Hawaii. And that it wasn’t a drill. They repeated that. I got a text from a friend who’s an airline pilot who runs a Honolulu route and happened to be in town saying, ‘Did you guys see this?’ My wife called a friend of hers on the Big Island to see whether it was something that was just Honolulu, just Oahu, or the entire state. She was able to get through, and her friend said ‘Yes, it’s for the entire state.’

“At that point, we secured all the windows and all the doors. We started filling the tubs and every container we could with water. And texting family and friends. There’s been an increasing amount of information in Hawaii about what to do in case of a ballistic missile, over the last few months, clearly tied to tensions with North Korea. Everybody in Hawaii is very aware that after Guam we’re the next-closest target. We’re the only part of the U.S. that’s been a target of a military attack by a foreign power in the past century. And, of course, coming from New York, being the target of a non-military attack, that resonated with us in the worst possible way. Hawaii has also started doing monthly air-raid drills.

“It took me maybe a minute to process that this was actually happening. It was an ‘Oh my god, but I need to execute, I need to get things done’ kind of feeling. ‘Is this real? Can this really happen? They’re gonna shoot it down, right? What happens if our building collapses and we can’t get to our little girl?’

“After about five minutes, we were visibly upset. My wife was crying, and George, our daughter, wanted to know why. We asked her to come over for a family hug. We explained that we’d heard very bad news that something very, very bad was happening and it had us really, really upset. I don’t think she really understands nuclear Armageddon or ballistic missiles, but she certainly understands that Mommy and Daddy are really upset.

“We continued to fill every container we could find with water for maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes. We tried calling people. My wife tried her father in Chicago three times, got a busy signal. I texted my mother and my twenty-one-year-old daughter. We texted the rest of my wife’s family to say there’s a ballistic missile coming towards Hawaii and it’s not a drill.

“I’m not a religious person. There are no prayers to God in our household.

“At eight twenty-nine, we got a text back from my wife’s sister-in-law saying it was a hoax. Half an hour had passed, roughly. Then I checked and started seeing reports on Twitter from Tulsi Gabbard and other reps, from the governor, saying this was a false alarm. Then we got an alert over the building loudspeaker also saying it was a false alarm. Then we got the cell-phone alert. At that point, I was able to get through to my mother on the phone. She reported that what she saw on the news in the mainland was nothing until finally they said, ‘Oh, there’s a false alarm of a missile coming into Hawaii.’ Meanwhile, everyone over here is really upset and thinks they’re all going to die. Our friend the pilot was in a hotel saying the lobby was full of crying children.

“We began to relax a little and start to deal with the aftereffects of a severe adrenaline rush. I’m still shaking, though. My wife is still having waves of goose bumps and chills periodically….. 

From Twitter Moments, 14 January 2018:

New public register published as part of a federal crackdown on non-complying day care centres

This month the Turnbull Government published a new public register as part of its crackdown on fraud in the day care sector.

Australian Department of Education, Child Care Enforcement Action Register. 6 January 2018:

The Child Care Enforcement Action Register is a list of services that have been the subject of a sanction and/or immediate suspension under the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) (Administration) Act 1999 (the Administration Act).

In accordance with section 201B of the Administration Act, the Department of Education and Training (the department) publishes a list of services that have been sanctioned under section 200 and/or suspended under section 201A of that Act. Information published on this page only relates to those enforcement actions permitted to be published under the Family Assistance Law (FAL).

The department has established the Child Care Enforcement Action Register because it considers that information on sanctions should be available to the public. Information about the responsibilities and obligations of approved child care services and the FAL can be found on the department’s website.

The information relates to enforcement action taken by the department between 1 July 2016 and 30 September 2017.

2017-2018 (First Quarter) - last updated in January 2018:

VICTORIA (VIC)

NEW SOUTH WALES (NSW)

QUEENSLAND (QLD)

SOUTH AUSTRALIA (SA)

WESTERN AUSTRALIA (WA)

AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY (ACT)

2016-2017 - last updated in December 2017:

VICTORIA (VIC)

NEW SOUTH WALES (NSW)

QUEENSLAND (QLD)

SOUTH AUSTRALIA (SA)

WESTERN AUSTRALIA (WA)

AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY (ACT)

NORTHERN TERRITORY (NT)

Only one NSW North Coast service has been placed on this federal government name and shame file – Elite Edge Sports & Learning Centre at Terranora. With a suspension on the basis of “Non-compliance with State or Commonwealth Law” as of 2 June 2017.

The majority of named NSW child care centres and other services being in metropolitan areas.

As more national governments veer towards fascism the level of danger Facebook presents rises

The Trump Regime is busy dismantling democratic checks and balances in the United States, the May Government in Britain is handing powers of arrest to certain multinational corporations and in Australia federal and state right-wing politicians slavishly ape Republican and Conservative policies.

Rabid nationalism, religious extremism, contrived xenophobia, authoritarianism, contempt for human rights and disdain for democratic processes appear to be the order of the day for too many political leaders in too many 'western' countries around the world.

Smack bang in the middle of this political miasma is a vast and powerful IT multinational which wouldn’t recognise an ethic if it fell over it.

How long before the aims of modern day fascism and Facebook Inc merge?

Public Integrity, 31 July 2017:

When Chicago resident Carlo Licata joined Facebook in 2009, he did what the 390 million other users of the world’s largest social network had already done: He posted photos of himself and friends, tagging the images with names.

But what Licata, now 34, didn’t know was that every time he was tagged, Facebook stored his digitized face in its growing database.

Angered this was done without his knowledge, Licata sued Facebook in 2015 as part of a class action lawsuit filed in Illinois state court accusing the company of violating a one-of-a-kind Illinois law that prohibits collection of biometric data without permission. The suit is ongoing.

Facebook denied the charges, arguing the law doesn’t apply to them. But behind the scenes, the social network giant is working feverishly to prevent other states from enacting a law like the one in Illinois.

Since the suit was filed, Facebook has stepped up its state lobbying, according to records and interviews with lawmakers. But rather than wading into policy fights itself, Facebook has turned to lower-profile trade groups such as the Internet Association, based in Washington, D.C., and the Illinois-based trade association CompTIA to head off bills that would give users more control over how their likenesses are used or whom they can be sold to. 

That effort is part of a wider agenda. Tech companies, whose business model is based on collecting data about its users and using it to sell ads, frequently oppose consumer privacy legislation. But privacy advocates say Facebook is uniquely aggressive in opposing all forms of regulation on its technology.

And the strategy has been working. Bills that would have created new consumer data protections for facial recognition were proposed in at least five states this year — Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Alaska — but all failed, except the Washington bill, which passed only after its scope was limited.

No federal law regulates how companies use biometric privacy or facial recognition, and no lawmaker has ever introduced a bill to do so. That prompted the Government Accountability Office to conclude in 2015 that the “privacy issues that have been raised by facial recognition technology serve as yet another example of the need to adapt federal privacy law to reflect new technologies.” Congress did, however, roll back privacy protections in March by allowing Internet providers to sell browser data without the consumer’s permission.

Facebook says on its website it won’t ever sell users’ data, but the company is poised to cash in on facial recognition in other ways. The market for facial recognition is forecast to grow to $9.6 billion by 2022, according to analysts at Allied Market Research, as companies look for ways to authenticate and recognize repeat customers in stores, or offer specific ads based on a customer’s gender or age.

Facebook is working on advanced recognition technology that would put names to faces even if they are obscured and identify people by their clothing and posture. Facebook has filed patents for technology allowing Facebook to tailor ads based on users’ facial expressions……

Facial recognition’s use is increasing. Retailers employ it to identify shoplifters, and bankers want to use it to secure bank accounts at ATMs. The Internet of things — connecting thousands of everyday personal objects from light bulbs to cars — may use an individual’s face to allow access to household devices. Churches already use facial recognition to track attendance at services.

Government is relying on it as well. President Donald Trump staffed the U.S. Homeland Security Department transition team with at least four executives tied to facial recognition firms. Law enforcement agencies run facial recognition programs using mug shots and driver’s license photos to identify suspects. About half of adult Americans are included in a facial recognition database maintained by law enforcement, estimates the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law School.

To tap into this booming business, companies need something only Facebook has — a massive database of faces.

Facebook now has 2 billion monthly users who upload about 350 million photos every day — a “practically infinite” amount of data that Facebook can use to train its facial recognition software, according to a 2014 presentation by an engineer working on DeepFace, Facebook’s in-house facial-recognition project.