AUSTRAC has been on a very nice little earner fining banks billions of dollars for money-laundering failures.
Maybe it’s time to add another big target – the federal government for its role as an accessory before and after the fact.
As detailed in an Angus Grigg Australian Financial Review story over the weekend, the Morrison government is doing its bit to promote Australia as a safe haven for laundered money and the proceeds of corruption.
The government has quietly ditched its pledge to introduce a beneficial ownership register that would disclose the ultimate owners of companies, vastly improving our present opaque transparency that, among other things, makes Australian real estate a prime market for hiding dirty money.
The relevant minister for the government’s non-performance is Senator Jane Hume.
The AFR reported her spokesman refused to answer questions on the promised beneficial ownership register.
Perhaps this should not surprise. Senator Hume has form on the matter of transparency and integrity, or lack thereof.
Senator Hume is the Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy and thus is responsible for the government’s Your Future Your Super reforms.
The YFYS legislation has admirable overall aims of reducing superannuation costs and getting rid of dud funds, but those declared aims are undermined by highly dubious details that raise serious questions about the government’s real intentions.
Colleague Rod Myer has comprehensively covered the contentious YFYS issues. They can get complicated.
For mine, it is possible to focus on one glaring aspect of the legislation and form the opinion that the government is simply crooked – I can’t imagine another explanation.
This is the government’s quite unbelievable plan to ignore administration costs in ranking super fund performance, preferring to only count investment costs.
As the accompanying Productivity Commission graph shows, retail funds (profit-for-shareholders) have starkly higher non-investment costs. Their administration costs are a multiple of corporate, industry and public sector funds’ admin fees.
Senator Hume’s desire to disregard the real cost of fees and boost the fiddled performance of retail funds is gobsmackingly blatant.
Doing favours for mates, taking orders from party backers, looking after select friends and supporters, eats away at trust in government, destroys any perceptions of integrity no matter how many photo op stunts are pulled.
Quite simply, when it comes to money and mates, the government can’t be trusted.
Michael West Media has campaigned (to no avail) on the “secret rich list” maintained by the government – 1119 companies that are exempted from having to lodge financial reports with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
You don’t have to be a cynic to suspect whose ear the people behind those companies have.
With a track record of corrupt grants, ditching the beneficial ownership register, perverting super fund costs measurement, stacking government boards and tribunals, and preserving privileged secrecy, there is little wonder that major policy ends up favouring mates and backers instead of the nation.
Yes, our climate policy, the “crime of the century” as colleague Alan Kohler calls it, ends up being par for the course.
As Grigg’s AFR report makes clear, the Morrison government is apparently content to protect dirty money at the shell company level.
Acting for planetary dirty money at the top end is merely being consistent.
