Billie

I am not opposed to Public servants retiring at 54 and 11 months, or resigning, to be more precise.

I am in that category. I am just pointing out that the ATO (and I think many public service organisations) are not prepared or preparing for the loss of expertise exemplified by the 54/11 issue.

In retrospect I should have concetrated on the loss of expertise issue, not the 54/11 example.

You are in wilful misunderstanding mode, Passy.

Or maybe it is that you read too quickly to absorb the meaning. I am generally very careful with words - not always, but most often.

Here, I am going to stand by them fully.

(By the way, were you ever required back in junior school to parse a sentence - you know, identify subject, verb, object and so on? It is a good discipline to learn.)

"Most often, it is timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned public servants who do the moaning."

The subject of the sentence is "public servants". The verb is "do the moaning".

However, the quantum of public servants involved is strictly qualified by the need for each one to match the full set of adjectives: "timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned...".

I made no suggestion as to how many public servants meet these adjectival requirements, or even whether any do. So no stereotyping is involved, simply a determination of "if the cap fits..."

The link with context is made through the adverbial "most often", which not only reflects the pub environment where I find these moaners, but also leaves open the possibility that other barflies there might similarly indulge in said moaning - including, if you are going to be pedantic about it, public servants who fulfil one or more, but not all, of the descriptors listed.

>>Then again, my drinking mates are pretty eloquent, witty, charming, and political too.<<

Mine too.

Especially as the evening wears on, when everyone becomes positively Churchillian, rhetoric-wise.

You couldn't resist the little jab, could you?

>>Of course private enterprise is always more efficient - telstra, the banks etc come to mind.<<

I'm a small business, so I share the general loathing of these organizations.

But the problem is that they are encouraged by mis-directed regulation to operate in conditions of imperfect competition, hence they act more like monopolies or cartels.

Cravenly weak governments, over many decades, have led to this situation. More competition will eventually solve the problem, if any government ever has the courage to deregulate the banking system.

You are in wilful misunderstanding mode, Passy.

Or maybe it is that you read too quickly to absorb the meaning. I am generally very careful with words - not always, but most often.

Here, I am going to stand by them fully.

(By the way, were you ever required back in junior school to parse a sentence - you know, identify subject, verb, object and so on? It is a good discipline to learn.)

"Most often, it is timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned public servants who do the moaning."

The subject of the sentence is "public servants". The verb is "do the moaning".

However, the quantum of public servants involved is strictly qualified by the need for each one to match the full set of adjectives: "timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned...".

I made no suggestion as to how many public servants meet these adjectival requirements, or even whether any do. So no stereotyping is involved, simply a determination of "if the cap fits..."

The link with context is made through the adverbial "most often", which not only reflects the pub environment where I find these moaners, but also leaves open the possibility that other barflies there might similarly indulge in said moaning - including, if you are going to be pedantic about it, public servants who fulfil one or more, but not all, of the descriptors listed.

>>Then again, my drinking mates are pretty eloquent, witty, charming, and political too.<<

Mine too.

Especially as the evening wears on, when everyone becomes positively Churchillian, rhetoric-wise.

You couldn't resist the little jab, could you?

>>Of course private enterprise is always more efficient - telstra, the banks etc come to mind.<<

I'm a small business, so I share the general loathing of these organizations.

But the problem is that they are encouraged by mis-directed regulation to operate in conditions of imperfect competition, hence they act more like monopolies or cartels.

Cravenly weak governments, over many decades, have led to this situation. More competition will eventually solve the problem, if any government ever has the courage to deregulate the banking and telecommunication systems.

Thanks for the grammar lesson, Pericles. Your hair splitting reminds me a bit of Bill Clinton before the Lewinski hearings.

You mention the failure of regulation to prevent monopolisation. In fact monopolisation is inherent in capitalism and is the logical consequence of competition and the drive for more and more profit.

It is interesting that my article has provoked positive comment from former and serving tax officers.

Serving tax officers are too scared to agree with me publicly, given that there could be redundancies flowing throughout the ATO in the near future. It would be interesting to know how many staff have gone since Rudd's 3.25% efficiency dividend came in and how many more reductions are or might be planned, and what the implications are or wil be for tax collection in Australia.

The Commissioner's comments at Senate Estimates in February this year are relevant. He said:

"The Government's current efficiency drive may, in addition to our efforts to further improve our efficiency, necessitate the diversion of resources from other areas to meet the Government's policy agenda in this reagrd..."

I think he was saying the efficiency dividend is a crock but in obfuscatory language only the likes of Pericles could welcome.

Hair-splitting?

>>Thanks for the grammar lesson, Pericles. Your hair splitting reminds me a bit of Bill Clinton before the Lewinski hearings<<

My explanation was only necessary in order to show how you had grasped the wrong end of the stick, Passy. If you are now saying it was not needed, than you must have deliberately chosen to misunderstand me the first time around.

I was in fact giving you the benefit of the doubt. Won't happen again.

>>monopolisation is inherent in capitalism and is the logical consequence of competition and the drive for more and more profit<<

I would have thought that if the twentieth century showed us anything, it was that monopolisation is most evident in state control over the means of production and distribution (communism, to those with short memories).

Far from being "inherent", unrestricted and fair competition will stave off the creation of a monopoly for a very long time. It is only when governments put their own political interests ahead of those of the people, that capitalist monopolies are able to come into existence.

And quite how you got the idea that I am in favour of "obfuscatory language" boggles the imagination...

>>I think he was saying the efficiency dividend is a crock but in obfuscatory language only the likes of Pericles could welcome.<<

Even more interesting is that I managed to get a completely different impression from the quoted text.

"The Government's current efficiency drive may, in addition to our efforts to further improve our efficiency, necessitate the diversion of resources from other areas to meet the Government's policy agenda in this reagrd..."

To me, this is a straightforward threat.

If you insist on this, it seems to be saying, we are going to divert so much resources to the effort - as only public servants can - that instead of becoming more efficient, we will bring government services to a standstill.

Am I misunderstanding this Passy? Perhaps you can parse the sentence for me, to make it clearer.

Sorry Pericles, I was annoyed with what appeared to be your attempt to justify your slur on public servants by saying you weren't slurring them. I will try to be more temperate in future.

I think you and I agree about what the Commissioner is saying.

I think the trend in capitalism to monopoly reached its apogee in the merging of state and capital in the Stalinist countries (what you call communism but what I call Stalinism, the gravedigger of socialism). Similar statist trends are evident in Western countries after the war.

I will have a hunt around for some figures on monopoly to show the trend continues and appears inexorable. Increased mergers and acquisitions over time are one example of this. For example BHP merged with Billiton and now wants to merge with Rio Tinto.

I think the main point is valid - monopoly is the logical outcome of competition. No amount of tinkering can change that.

I think this reflects itself in tax administration. The ATO has interest in mergers and acquisitions since many of them will involve tax preferred outcomes, some of which may be avoidance. In addition because this is often the big end of town the amounts involved are massive, (in some cases enough to destroy Budget predictions of surplus etc) and they are often multi-jurisdictional.

The task for the ATO is to anticipate these changes and others and be prepared for them, to battle those who see Australia as a convenient staging post for tax effective transactions and to protect the revenue as a consequence. This is no small task and one unarticulated point of my article was to ask how prepared and ready the ATO is to address the forces of global capitalism as they continue to restructure? This is but one part of the wider question for us as individuals and societies in the face of constant and ongoing globalisation.

My tentative conclusion was that the ATO has some preparedness, but maybe not as much as it thinks.

TBC.