Queensland Land Court begins hearing conservation group challenge against proposed $1 billion coal mine
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Mackay Conservation Group (MCG) have lodged an application in the Land Court of Queensland, objecting to Whitehaven Coal's Winchester South open-cut coal mine.
The $1 billion project is expected to produce up to 17 million tonnes of coal a year over its 28-year life span.
The open-cut mine — set to be located 30 kilometres south-east of Moranbah — would extract mostly metallurgical coal, used to make steel, and thermal coal.
It would involve the construction of a coal processing plant and a rail loop to connect with the existing Bowen Basin coal rail network.
The two environmental groups are expected to argue the court should recommend against the project being granted a mining lease and environmental authority due to its significant environmental and human rights impacts.
ACF climate and energy project manager, Gavan McFadzean, said the project would generate at least 583 million tonnes of climate pollution.
"It's a coal project that will emit more emissions than Australia does in an entire year," he said outside court in Brisbane before the hearing.
"New coal projects simply cannot be approved, if we're to stay within a 1.5 degree [Celsius] pathway."
MCG climate campaigner Imogen Lindenberg said local communities needed to be protected from the impacts of climate change.
"We are already living in a time of climate catastrophes, we can't afford to keep making the same mistakes again and again," she said.
"We can't afford to keep opening brand new coal mines if we're to protect our land, water, climate and our communities.
Whitehaven Coal says the Winchester South project would support 500 jobs during construction and operation.
Whitehaven Coal's barrister Saul Holt KC told the court in his opening remarks, he would outline over the course of the hearing why this was the "right project, in the right place, by the right miner, at the right time."
He said the project was supported by the area's traditional owners — the Barada Barna people — and had "widespread community support".
Mr Holt said there was a "strong demand" from customers for metallurgical and thermal coal over the project's life, in addition to support from the landholder and the neighbouring Eagle Down coal mine which it would have a "significant and ongoing relationship with".
"It promises considerable economic benefit to the local community and the people of Queensland," he said.
He said 60 per cent of the coal mined at Whitehaven would be metallurgical and 40 per cent would be thermal, to be used in electricity production.
In 2022, the Queensland Land Court ruled human rights would be unjustifiably limited by mining company Waratah Coal's proposal to build Australia's largest thermal coal mine in Central Queensland.
Mr Holt said Whitehaven Coal's mine was a majority metallurgical project, which was one of its "many points of distinction" with the Waratah Coal case.
ACF and MCG's barrister Emrys Nekvapil SC said while the applicant would argue the strong economical benefits of metallurgical, its extraction would still have an environmental impact.
"For the present point, metallurgical and thermal coal is all coal," he said in his opening remarks.
"Regardless of the label, its extraction will increase the atmospheric concentration causing environmental harm."
Mr Nekvapil said Whitehaven Coal needed to establish the project would improve the total quality of life for current and future generations.
"This coal mine is proposed to operate for one further generation, the applicant proposes immediate financial and employment benefits for some in the present generation and royalties for the Crown," he said.
"But the generations to follow will suffer the degradation of their ecosystem caused by the cumulative effect of the greenhouse gas emission unlocked by this mine."
The matter is expected to run for at least seven weeks in the Land Court of Queensland, with Judge Nicholas Loos to visit the mine's proposed site over the next three days.
At the end of the hearing the Land Court will recommend whether the mine be refused or approved, then it will be up to the Queensland government to make a decision about whether the project proceeds.
The coal mine project is currently subject to a lengthy approval process.
The state's coordinator general recommended the project proceed in 2023, subject to conditions and recommendations, following an assessment of its Environment Impact Statement.
In 2024, the Queensland Department of Environment, Science and Innovation approved the mine's Environmental Authority (EA) application.
Whitehaven would still need to be issued with an EA and mining lease from the state government.
The federal government makes the final decision and approvals about whether the project gets the green light.
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ABC News
29 minutes ago
- ABC News
The ATO learned it was being scammed, then paid out millions more to fraudsters
It was a scam so simple it took just minutes on your phone, where you could tell the tax office how much money to pay you, and it came through within days. The ATO loophole was so vast, tens of thousands of Australians stole a total of $2 billion. It was Australia's largest GST fraud. But it did not need to be this way. New details uncovered by Four Corners show the ATO was warned its systems were badly lacking, but even when it eventually discovered the fraud, it continued to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars. The ATO maintains it cracked down hard on the scam, moving quickly to shut down the perpetrators and cut off the money. The case of Linden Phillips would suggest otherwise. It showcases in granular detail the ATO's failures and how, while some loopholes are closed, others are being exploited on a far larger scale. Linden Phillips was no criminal mastermind, but from his home in the Victorian river town of Mildura, he easily exploited giant flaws in the ATO's GST refund system. It was August 2021, and Phillips had just been released from jail. According to court filings, a week after his release, he "opened several bank accounts" in his own name and registered a previously created ABN for GST. That was step one. Next was proof of concept. This could have taken just two minutes and involved putting just three numbers into the ATO's systems. Phillips did this by logging into his myGov account — available on your phone — and going to the ATO's GST page. Here, he said his fictitious earth-moving business had recorded minimal sales for the month. Phillips then said he was entitled to $13,158 as a GST refund. Amazingly, he did not have to specify why this was. At this stage, no one was required to check the veracity of his Business Activity Statement before paying. The ATO simply assumed he had invested in stock or capital equipment during the quarter. As the court noted, "the appellant [Phillips] did not engage in a business and had no income or outgoings for such a business". Within a week, the money was in his bank account. That was the trial run. Phillips was only just getting started. The next month, he lodged 46 separate GST refund claims seeking $821,279 from the ATO. The problem was that Phillips had been in jail for most of the time covered by these claims. Despite this, the ATO paid up promptly. Once again, the ATO had not made a single inquiry before paying the money. The algorithm in its system, rather than any human, approved the refund. To claim such a giant GST refund, Phillips would have needed to spend around $9.7 million on his business over three years. All this while having minimal sales, yet enough cash flow to not bother claiming the GST refund each month. Somehow, this was not a red flag when the ATO was paying out the money. Just weeks after Phillips made his second claim, someone at the ATO twigged that his enterprise may not be legitimate. Finally, there was a human in the loop. An ATO officer rang Phillips and was told the statements had been prepared by his accountant, for which he provided a name and number. "The number was in fact registered to a different person … not an accountant but a painter," according to the court documents. The ATO followed up with a letter to Phillips, which he ignored. As he did to further calls and emails from the ATO. Despite the suspicious behaviour, the ATO did nothing. In the meantime, Phillips bought himself a Porsche and his mother a house. The ATO would sit on its hands for the next four months, giving pause to its claim to have cracked down hard and quickly brought the scam under control. When Phillips was caught, it had nothing to do with the ATO. He was arrested in April 2022 by Mildura detective Vanessa Power, who was searching his home looking for drugs and guns. She checked Phillips's phone and "identified a series of fraudulent ATO claims," according to Victoria Police. That led police to a further 63 other offenders in the Mildura area. It was around this time that the ATO began to take the threat seriously. Four months after it first identified a problem with Phillips's GST refunds, the ATO launched Operation Protego, led by its Serious Financial Crimes taskforce. By this time, the ATO estimates $850 million had been stolen from the tax system. While Protego was operating, then-federal assistant treasurer Stephen Jones said it was "pretty easy to work out whether" some had lodged a "legitimate" GST claim or not. "There's lots of analytics that the ATO can do to work out whether this is a legitimate business or not," he said. That may have been true, but the ATO was not identifying many of these false claims until after the money had been paid. It would take the tax office 18 months to get the scam under control, and by this time, $2 billion had been stolen from the tax system. The ATO said when it launched Operation Protego that it assigned 470 extra staff to verify GST claims, and that by May 2022, "almost all fraud attempts were being stopped". All up, the ATO estimated 57,000 people were involved in the scam. Of these, just 122 have been convicted, while the ATO has only recovered $96 million — just 5 per cent of the money stolen from the tax system. The banks have helped recover another $64 million by freezing accounts. In the years leading up to the scam, the ATO's analysis showed its fraud detection systems, which should have prevented the scam, were not up to scratch. A 2018 report unearthed by Four Corners outlined how the systems were lacking. The report's author, Ali Noroozi, spent 10 years as the inspector general of taxation. Citing the ATO's internal data, he found that its so-called risk assessment systems were only marginally better than random selection. "They have certainly been on notice that their risk assessment tools could do better," Mr Noroozi told Four Corners. The tax office was slow to heed this warning, and then it also downgraded its assessment of external fraud risks from "severe" to "low" two months before the scam took off in mid-2021. It said the likelihood of risk had gone from "almost certain" to "rare". The tax office said it began building and updating new fraud detection systems even before the critical 2018 inspector general report. But the auditor general noted one of the ATO's new fraud detection systems ran a year late and was therefore not fully switched on until January 2022. At this point, it successfully detected the massive fraud, but it still took the tax office a further three months to launch Operation Protego. The auditor general found "the ATO did not have a procedure to respond to a large-scale external fraud event" like the GST scams. Watch as Four Corners investigates one of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the country, tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview. Tax experts said these processes need humans in the loop. "Before money goes out the door, particularly if there's been large changes in a taxpayer's details or accounts, that should be verified," said Karen Payne, who stepped down last year as inspector general of taxation. "Once upon a time, there was a desk audit when you first lodged your GST return to make sure you are carrying on a business that you can verify and these amounts that you're claiming are legitimate." As the Abbott government swept to power in 2013, the ATO was moving away from this model of human verification to an automated system. That would eventually see around 1,000 staff — or half the people in the division responsible for the GST — lose their jobs. "I'm not sure the ATO has ever recovered from that sort of drain of knowledge and drain of skill sets," said Stephen Hathway, a liquidator currently investigating a large-scale GST fraud. "The people [at the ATO] work really hard and diligently, but there just needs to be more of them. And there needs to be more regard to getting out there in the field and making those inquiries." While the ATO has claimed to have contained smaller-scale GST frauds as part of Operation Protego, it has struggled to stop loopholes being exploited by larger-scale scams. Stephen Hathway has seen this up close. He is currently chasing Nahi Gazal, who claims to be a wealthy Sydney property developer, but has been accused of masterminding a giant GST fraud. Gazal and his associates managed to squeeze more than $21 million out of the tax office in GST refunds. They allegedly used fake invoices to claim GST refunds for building projects that either did not exist or had been completed by other developers. Once again, the ATO did not bother to do even the most basic of checks. "It never had any legitimacy," Mr Hathway said. "There's nothing in it that ever demonstrates any act of commerce or enterprise. The whole set of transactions were completely and utterly made up, fraudulent, had no basis." By September 2023, the ATO had issued Gazal with a $44 million tax bill, including penalty interest. Four Corners can reveal that while the ATO was chasing Gazal for that money, it failed to detect that he was using a new string of companies to continue scamming the tax office. Mr Hathway has been funded by the ATO to pursue Gazal over this latest scheme, and has connected him to an additional 22 companies, which Mr Hathway said have fraudulently claimed another $25 million in GST refunds. Once again, Gazal claimed to be a property developer. "Not one bag of nails was bought from Bunnings," Mr Hathway said. But once again, the ATO did not check before paying out the GST refunds to Gazal's companies. Mr Hathway said the ATO never asked basic questions, like the address of the properties being developed, whether a development application had been approved, or to even look at a building contract. "I'm the liquidator after the event. And then when we're looking into the file, we find nothing," Mr Hathway said. Mr Hathway was not hopeful the ATO would be able to recover much of the money, and said there was nothing to stop someone else from doing the same thing. Karen Payne said the tax office needed to do better, as these frauds resulted in less money for essential services. "We should all care because it raises revenues that allow the government … to fund the services that we all benefit from … health, defence, security, infrastructure … it's pretty key part of our democracy." Watch Four Corners' full investigation into the tax system, No Return, tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Cheaper medicines and HECS top parliamentary agenda as tax debate ramps up
The Albanese government will try to keep attention on its election promises as the new federal parliament returns for its second week, but will face further scrutiny about what new policies it plans to unveil at next month's economic roundtable. Labor will introduce legislation to cut the price of PBS medicines to $25 and will also seek to pass the HECS loan cuts introduced last week in what Anthony Albanese said was a deliberate prioritisation of cost-of-living measures. "What we've done very clearly in the first fortnight is concentrate on measures that make a difference to people's money in their pocket. We make no apology for that … That was the basis on which we were elected," he told the ABC's Insiders on Sunday. The $25-per-script price would start in the new year and reduce annual user costs by an estimated $200 million. The $7.70 script price for pension and concession card holders, frozen until 2030, would be unchanged. The policy was matched by the Coalition during the election campaign, so it is unlikely to be controversial, with the opposition also signalling it will likely support the HECS cuts. But there is no timeline for Labor to re-introduce its stalled proposal to double the earnings tax on superannuation balances for those with balances over $3 million, controversial because it would include the "unrealised" earnings of assets. Mr Albanese on Sunday dismissed the Treasury's advice that taxes would need to be raised to fix the budget, reported by the ABC earlier this month, and including an option identified by the department to "build on" the super tax. "Treasury, of course, will put forward advice to government from time to time. That's not government policy … Our starting point is the positions that we took to the election." But the government will face fresh questions this week about its plans to go beyond its election platform in the August roundtable led by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who has already declared openness to tax changes as part of a reform package. Unions, business groups, and economists are already jostling to propose ideas for the three-day discussion forum to be held in late August before the next parliamentary sitting, where Mr Chalmers and Mr Albanese say they are open to any ideas. The Business Council (BCA) has this week revealed one of its main proposals, to increase the generosity of the tax credit for research and development spending, with the greatest concessions for Australian research commercialised in Australia. In a joint report with Australian companies Atlassian and Cochlear, who are among the biggest users of the tax credit with a combined $316 million spend in the most recent year of data, the BCA has called for an 18.5 per cent flat-rate incentive. "Empowering businesses to make research and development investments is critical to making our economy more productive and innovative, and for delivering greater prosperity for all Australians," the lobby's chief executive, Bran Black, said. "If we don't act now, then we will keep losing innovators, capital, and ideas to other nations." Support for lower company taxes, which appeared to be echoed in Treasury advice, was also on display at a pre-roundtable roundtable convened last Friday by independent MP Allegra Spender. Former treasury secretary Ken Henry and ANU tax professor Bob Breunig, both of whom will attend Mr Chalmers's roundtable, told the forum that company taxes should be reconsidered to tax rents such as mining income more, but entrepreneurship less. Mr Breunig, a noted sceptic of tax incentives for research and development who has argued there is little evidence they spur on research that would not have occurred otherwise, instead proposed a tax deduction for investing in businesses. "If you invest in a company and you make a modest rate of return … that return would be tax-free … Kind of like a tax-free threshold for corporations," he suggested. The forum saw dozens of tax and budget proposals raised, with general agreement that budget sustainability would require some combination of spending cuts, higher taxes, and policies to support economic growth, consistent with Treasury advice. Suggested targets for raising taxes included the petroleum resources rent tax, further changes to super tax concessions, higher capital gains tax, and increasing the GST, although the treasurer and PM have appeared reluctant to consider that move. On the spending side, Michael Brennan of the e61 Institute identified what he called a "capital binge" on infrastructure projects, including at the state level. "There's a lot of value destruction going on in these mega-projects where the benefits are nothing like the value of the cash being [spent]," Mr Brennan said. Participants agreed the government should consider a large package doing multiple things at once, a "grand bargain" rather than "piecemeal" reform. "Tax reform cannot be done piecemeal," Mr Henry said. "This is the lesson that I take from Australia's tax reform adventures of the last 40 years. If it's going to be successful, it's going to have to be big." While Mr Chalmers has embraced suggestions he could pursue ambitious changes, Mr Albanese has seemed more reticent and on Sunday again emphasised the roundtable's focus on economic growth rather than tax changes, branding it a "productivity summit". "[It] is about how do we get that economic growth in the future? And what the productivity summit is about is identifying ways, including [industry investment program] Future Made in Australia. "How do we fix housing? How do we fix these issues in a way that is fiscally responsible?" The Coalition has sent early signals that it would likely oppose any tax reform package that increased the overall tax take, but is likely to be distracted again this week by internal disagreement about net zero. The WA Liberal Party's state council passed a motion calling to drop the net zero by 2050 target, effectively backed in the aftermath by the two most prominent federal frontbenchers from the state, conservatives Andrew Hastie and Michaelia Cash. "We recommitted to emissions reduction, but we will not do that like Mr Albanese legislating a net zero target by 2050," Senator Cash told Sky News on Sunday. "Let's be honest here, the WA Liberal Party have been very, very clear we will not crash the economy in doing so … And we will make sure we do not impose any unnecessary costs on them."
ABC News
3 hours ago
- ABC News
How easy is it to trick the Australian Taxation Office?
Sam Hawley: How easy is it to trick the Australian Tax Office? Well, for fraudsters it's not hard at all and plenty have done it costing taxpayers billions of dollars that have never been recovered. Today, Angus Grigg on his Four Corners investigation into the biggest GST scam in history and how the ATO dropped the ball. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Sam Hawley: Angus, you've been hard at work looking into what's going on at the Australian Tax Office. And you've really been having a deep look into this huge GST scam. Now, this unfolded in no other than Mildura in north-west Victoria. So, take me there and tell me about local resident Sarah. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Mildura is a really beautiful town, an irrigation town on the Murray in North West Victoria. And this GST scam really took off in Mildura. And it really was circulating within a sort of population that you might say is low socioeconomic groups, people on welfare, people with addiction issues. And we went to interview one person called Sarah. She was going through quite a bit of financial hardship at the time. I think she'd separated from her partner who was facing pretty serious charges at the time as well. And she was short of money because she needed to have some dental work done. So one of her friends showed her how to use a business that had been registered and an ABN linked to GST to claim GST refunds fraudulently. 'Sarah': The people that I was associating with at that time, they had done it and told me how easy it was to get a large amount of money quickly. And I just thought at the time it was a good idea because I was in a bit of financial trouble. Angus Grigg: She pretended, if you like, to be a hairdresser, despite the fact that she had no hairdressing qualifications. She'd never worked in a hairdresser, hadn't hired premises, had no equipment. And so she logged into her myGov account and first of all, claimed $15,000 and then did it a second time and got another $15,000. 'Sarah': I don't even really still understand how it went through. I was a single parent and then all of a sudden I'm a hairdresser that's getting this return put into my account with no other payments from clients or anything like that to balance it was needed. Like no proof. Angus Grigg: Now, bear in mind, the money went into the same account as her welfare payments and the money went within about 10 days without any verification, without any checks, without anyone from the tax office ringing and saying, what did you spend this money on? Do you have hairdressing qualifications? Have you hired premises? You know, she just absolutely couldn't believe how easy it was. 'Sarah': Yeah, I just couldn't believe it that it was just sitting there on my everyday access debit bank card. Angus Grigg: Now, the other thing to bear in mind, to receive a GST refund of $30,000, she would have needed to have capital expenditure or bought stock and other items for her hairdressing business of about $300,000. Now, surely a single mother living on welfare, getting family tax benefits, that should have been a red flag for the tax office. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. So Sarah, which is not her real name, just by the way, you've changed that for this story to keep her anonymous. She just tells the ATO she's a hairdresser and then the tax office falls for it. That's extraordinary. Angus Grigg: It is. And the fact that you don't need a receipt, you don't need any proof of the line of work you're in is extraordinary. And that's because the tax office basically fired most of the humans in the loop and started relying on algorithms or computers, if you like, to make these payments. They wanted to ensure the timely payment of GST refunds to businesses. But in doing that, they really opened the door up to fraud. Sam Hawley: Right. Sure. So the tax office wants to streamline things. But in the meantime, people like Sarah are all of a sudden dabbling in fraud. And as we've mentioned, she's not the only one. There's a lot of other people doing a very similar thing. Tell me about Linden Phillips. What was he up to? Angus Grigg: Linden Phillips, once again from Mildura, for us, he was like patient zero. It looks like he was the really one of the very, very early people in this scam. So what happens is that Linden Phillips gets out of jail in August 2021. And he already has a company registered. And so he reactivates his GST registration through his ABN and his MyGov account. And then within a couple of weeks of getting out of jail, he does what I'd sort of call a test run. And he claims $13,000 in GST refunds from the tax office. Once again, no documents, no receipts, no verification required. He gets that money within a couple of weeks and clearly then thinks, OK, I'm going to go for the big one. And so what he does is he lodges 46 backdated GST claims for an amount of $821,000 in GST. And the real kicker here is that for most of the period those GST claims are lodged, he's actually in jail. Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh. Angus Grigg: I know. He just couldn't make it up. Sam Hawley: What does he do with all that money? Angus Grigg: Well, of course, he spends it, right? Within a couple of weeks, the money's completely gone. He buys himself a second-hand Porsche. Somewhat endearingly, he buys his mother a house. But the really damning thing here is that the tax office notice it. Finally, someone, there's a human in the loop and they pick up the fact that, hey, maybe something's a bit wrong here. And so they ring him up and he says, oh yeah, no, it's all legitimate. I'll get my accountant to call you. The accountant never calls. They send him some emails. They write him some letters. He ignores them all. And the really damning thing here is the tax office does nothing for four months. And in that four month period, this scam absolutely explodes. So what we did is we went back and we deconstructed, if you like, the tax office's narrative. And the narrative was that this fraud took off on social media. The tax office noticed it. They cracked down really hard, really quickly, and they brought it under control. Now we sort about testing that idea. Sam Hawley: So the ATO says it did this great job. It cracked down on this fraud. But what actually happened? Because you actually had a look at that and discovered, in fact, the ATO didn't do much at all. Angus Grigg: No, exactly. So Linden Phillips does finally get caught, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the ATO. It all comes down to the smarts of a local detective in Mildura named Vanessa Power. Now, she is attending Phillips's house on a drugs and gun charge, and she searches his premises, his house, and she confiscates a phone. And using the sort of smarts that the ATO should be employing, she sees that on his phone there appears to be a pretty elaborate GST scam. And in fact, it looks as though that Linden Phillips had helped 60 other people perpetrate this scam. Linden Phillips is arrested. And then a few weeks later, the ATO finally launch what they call Operation Protego, which is to crack down on this GST scam. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. And at that point, of course, Sarah, who we spoke about earlier, she was also arrested back in December 2022. But the thing is, the money, it's sort of gone, right? 'Sarah': I can't pay it back. It's not even an option at the moment. Or it probably never will be. Sam Hawley: Is there any way the tax office can actually get these funds back? Angus Grigg: Well, this is the point, right? In the end, $2 billion was stolen from the tax system by 56,000 people. Now, the ATO tell us that of those 56,000 people who perpetrated this scam, just 120, I think it might be 122 now, have been convicted. Secondly, of the $2 billion stolen, the ATO tells us that only 160 million, or around 8% of that, has been recovered. Sam Hawley: And, Angus, that money, it really is just a drop in the ocean, right? Because you've also looked at all the other funds that the ATO hasn't managed to collect, and you've spoken to Karen Payne. Now, she's a former Inspector General of Taxation. She basically says if the ATO had collected what it was owed, then we would all be paying less tax. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Karen Payne, she really focused on what's called collectible debt. And that is this sort of giant number that the ATO doesn't like to talk about. And when she started looking at it, it was about $30 billion. Then it rose to about $50 billion. The figure is now $53 billion. And that is the amount of money or taxes that the ATO has levied, if you like, but not collected. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The large percentage of the debts that were due were in fact owned by a very small number of taxpayers or they're related to a small number of taxpayer accounts. So you'd kind of think it's a small number of people you need to be chasing. Angus Grigg: And the point that Karen Payne was making is that if we collected all that tax, perhaps we would not have to pay as much tax, all of us, but also we'd have more money to spend on really basic things like schools, roads and hospitals. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The fact that it keeps rising is troubling. So it's fundamental, I think, that we've got good administration of the tax system because the integrity of the tax system is fundamentally important to all of us. It pays for all of the services that we benefit from. Sam Hawley: Angus, despite everything that you have said, which is frankly really concerning, the ATO itself thinks it's doing a pretty good job, right? Because Chris Jordan, who was the tax commissioner up until 2024, he's been putting a rather positive spin on the ATO's work. Angus Grigg: Yeah. This is the really extraordinary thing. Despite all these scandals, the ATO tells us they are doing a great job. Just before Chris Jordan stepped down as tax commissioner, he did a victory lap, if you like, at the National Press Club, and he pointed out all the great, terrific things that the ATO has done. Chris Jordan, Tax Commissioner, 2013-24: We've successfully charted a massive program of transformation. We've cut red tape and we've modernised our administration of the tax system as part of the digital revolution to make tax just happen.
