Google to pay $481.5m in win for Australian Tax Office bringing total collected from IT giants to $1.25 billion

The Guardian, 18 December 2019:

The search engine giant Google has agreed to pay $481.5m to the Australian Tax Office in a major win for the agency in its battle to force big technology companies to pay tax in Australia.

The settlement, which covers a decade’s worth of tax between 2008 and 2018, will also help bolster a federal budget surplus that has been undermined by weak economic growth and the collapse of the Morrison government’s robodebt scheme.

It follows a lengthy campaign to get multinationals, especially technology and resources giants, to pay tax in Australia that was launched in 2015 by the then treasurer, Joe Hockey, and spearheaded by the tax commissioner, Chris Jordan.

Moves included more audits of tech and resources companies through a special ATO taskforce and introducing a suite of laws designed to force tech companies to book sales made in Australia locally, rather than running them through a tax haven such as Singapore or Ireland.

Deputy commissioner Mark Konza, who has overseen much of the ATO’s work dealing with tax-shy multinationals, said the settlement was “another great outcome for the Australian tax system”.

The ATO said Google’s settlement, together with others made by companies including Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, brought the total extra amount of cash collected from ecommerce industry players to $1.25bn.....

Unfortunately as Australia's federal budget blackhole is currently $2.1 billion and will reach a cumulative total of at least $7 billion by June 2021, the back taxes paid to date by these multinational corporations will be only a slight, passing relief for the national economy.

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM: a hit, a palpable hit!

Putting the fallacious argument against lowering Australia's greenhouse gas emissions into perspective.......

The Age, letter to the editor,17 December 2019, p.20:

Best Feel Good Tweet of 2019

Do you remember Nina Jongen, whose family home burned down in the Nymboida fires? She just won a tiny house. #NSWFires pic.twitter.com/WOILmnxTx1

— Calla Wahlquist (@callapilla) December 18, 2019

The house, which arrived with a stocked pantry, a Christmas tree and presents, was moved to their family property at Nymboida on Wednesday. It will allow them to return home for Christmas.....The house was supplied by Aussie Tiny Houses.

Meme of the Year

Photoshop image: @janeyhasmoved

Cartoons for the Festive Season

@FionaKatauskas

@Broelman

Clarence Valley regional economy tops $2.13 billion in 2018-19

Clarence Valley Independent, 18 December 2019:

Clarence Valley is outperforming the rest of regional NSW, according to the latest gross regional product figures for the year ending June 30, 2019.

“Gross regional product (GRP) is the equivalent of gross domestic product (GDP), but for a smaller area,” the .idcommunity demographic resources update states on Clarence Valley Council’s (CVC) website.

The CVC local government area’s GRP was $2,134m as of June 30, 2019.

The valley’s GRP grew by 3.1 per cent, which followed 1.3 per cent growth in 2018; whereas regional areas of NSW, overall, went backwards by 0.5 percent in both 2018 and 2019 – another national study, released this week by SGS Economics and Planning, rates GRP for the NSW regions as falling by 0.3 per cent......

In 2019 there were 18, 854 jobs in the valley, up by 3.1 per cent on 2018’s 18,288 jobs.

However, it is likely that the infrastructure builds in the valley have inflated that figure.....

Read the full article here.

The 2019-20 financial year may be a different story come end of June 2020, as bushfires have devastated much of the Clarence Valley's natural assets which attract a high number of visitors to the region and prolonged drought has bitten deeply, with the entire local government area impacted by drought & just over 88 per cent by intense drought as the year ends.

Facebook Inc. agrees to pay News Corp millions annually for news service content

Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter, No 105, December 2019, p.6:

105.2.1 Facebook’s news service

The launch of Facebook’s news service is a “powerful precedent that will echo around editorial departments”, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has declared (Australian, 28 October 2019). Thomson said it had been a difficult decade for journalism, but Facebook’s service was an important step. He said, “Great journalism will only be sustainable at scale if there is a fundamental change to the digital ecosystem. This announcement is an important step on the road.”

News Corp’s deal with Facebook — which covers the New York Post and Dow Jones publications such as the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s — will generate licence fees reaching into the double-digit millions of dollars a year, people familiar with the agreement said. “Of itself, it begins to change the terms of trade for quality journalism, both in establishing the principle of payment, and in allowing news organisations a clearer opportunity to generate advertising revenue on their terms,” Thomson said. He has led a global battle against Facebook and Google over issues including opaque algorithms, digital advertising dominance and a failure to pay for journalists’ work.....

Facebook’s news service launched with a test audience of 200,000 US users, but the platform plans to roll it out beyond the US early next year. A date for launch in Australia has not been announced.