ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The Prime Minister has reportedly looked over his two tax returns this year, one for Panama and one for Australia, and made double sure he didn’t lodge the wrong one here.
After being named in the so-called Paradise Papers last year, Malcolm Turnbull explained to The Advocate via an encrypted end-to-end messenger service that he needs to take extra special care this year as to not have a repeat of last July.
“It’s great people in this country have such short memories,” he said.
“Now we can focus on winning on the 28th. This will be a real litmus test for the nation’s political climate right now. I reckon we’ll shit it in, personally, but yeah. I’ve been wrong before and Christ knows I’ll probably be wrong again in the future,”
“But looking forward, I think these byelections will be good for us. Anyway, I just wanted to make double sure I was lodging the right tax return with the right country. I reckon another scandal like this would just about do us.”
The Advocate also reached out to the leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, who said he didn’t really understand the Paradise Papers in the first place – he just knows they’re bad.
The privately-educated union heavy told The Advocate today that he feels the immortal quote by Kerry Packer, the one about minimising tax, is so ingrained in the Australian psyche now that when people of note get caught doing the dodgy on their tax, it’s almost seen as being uniquely Australian and is lauded.
“I don’t think anybody is particularly surprised that Malcolm Turnbull minimises his tax to the point where it’s a negligible amount to him. He’s a cleverboy Rhodes scholar, you’d expect him to know how,”
“You wouldn’t really expect every Tom, Dick and Harry who grew up throwing rocks at cops by day and smoking bike hydro in a skatepark by night to know how to defraud the Australian Tax Office via a complex network of offshore accounts and shell companies, would you? That’s where in inequality comes from,”
“Anyway, nobody cares about that so going into these byelections, we’re just going to say he’s rich and out of touch with the common man. Which is true, he knows all the words to Kubla Khan off-by-heart. When he holds a spherical fruit, he doesn’t instinctively try to rip a leg break and catch it with his other hand. There’s no way he can with on the 28th!”
More to come.
