A cozy reach-around.

The miserable English novelist Thomas Hardy is credited with teasing out the close connection between comedy and tragedy, writing in a private letter in 1889 that “All comedy, is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it.” The American humorist Steve Allen popularised the insight as a formula in the 1950s. “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”

I guess it means that somewhere on an infinite time scale, the Greens and the ALP publicly grudge-fucking each other over social housing will morph into an epic lulzapalooza - but for now, the whole thing is leaning more tragic than comic. Except for some guys, of course, like this guy.

Separated at birth.

It’s tempting to give the lentil-eating mushheads of the Greens and cynical monsters of the ALP a kicking for their lethal foolishness, but they’re already doing such a good job of that, that it seems a bit wasteful.

The real perps are elsewhere.

Guys like this.

Who dat?

Dat is Peter-John Collins, a partner at the multinational tax avoidance gigafactory PWC, which you may recall from the Robodebt Royal Commission.

“Happy days,” wrote one of their partners, contemplating the feast of fees to be had from consulting on that slow-motion train wreck.

Collins worked in a different part of the firm. He suffered the ignominy of losing his status as a registered tax agent last year after the Tax Practitioners Board discovered a metric shit ton of confidentiality violations. To understand those violations, you need first understand that top-shelf tax avoidance specialists like PWC are invited into ‘consultative forums’ by the ATO where they are briefed on what the government is planning to do with tax law.

The rationale is probably that tax law is very complicated, and it’s best to make sure that the biggest practitioners understand any changes before they happen. The reality is that tax law is very complicated because the biggest practitioners with the wealthiest clients benefit from that complexity, applying their expensive skills to ensuring that somebody like Rupert Murdoch pays less personal tax than somebody like you.

For PWC, however, this cozy reach-around wasn’t nearly enough. The firm didn’t just exploit its inside knowledge to aggressively minimise the contributions of its wealthy clients to the inconvenient expense of running a modern civilisation. It also traded on its privileged access to the Tax Office to aggressively pursue new business from rich people who also wanted to live in a modern civilisation without having to pay for it.

Internal emails, some from Collins, but many from other senior partners at the firm, sprayed the government’s tax planning secrets around like a golden fucking shower while cautioning each other not to spread them any further and, if asked about the provenance, to explain away the information ‘as a rumour’.

In this way, PWC banked millions of dollars in extra fees by ‘owning the space’ for premium multinational tax avoidance advice. But the greater damage, of course, was done when they filed the tax returns for their clients. We don’t yet know, and probably never will, how many hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars were lost to the public, but given they were running this grift since 2014, it’s probably a few quid.

Enough, perhaps, to fund that housing package the Greens are demanding and the Labor government insists they cannot afford. And so they tear into each other while the actual villains of this piece kick back on their mega-yachts in Bermuda.

My apologies for returning to this topic for a second week in a row, but the problem isn’t that the Greens are a pack of witless chumbies or the ALP is a shambling horde of dead-on-the-inside cannibal centrists.

The problem is that the fucking rich do not pay tax.

Maybe one day we’ll realise this.