White pape on the objectives of tax reform, issues of avoidance and evasion, personal income taxation, consumption taxation, wealth taxation and business taxation.

In The Artful Aussie Tax Dodger, Lex Fullarton studies the impact of 100 years of taxation legislation in Australia, from 1915 to 2016. He finds that despite the lessons of a century of taxpayers and administrators' actions and reactions, old habits are hard to break. Driven by the winds of various political and social interests, Australia embarked on a century of tax reform from the moment when its first Income Tax Assessment Act was introduced. Fullarton discusses the oldest of tax planning entities, the British Trust, the introduction of Australia’s ‘reformed‘ consumption tax, its VAT, referred to as Goods and Services Tax, an analysis of tax avoidance schemes, and finally government taxation reform. This book looks at how Australia’s tax legislation was grounded, added to, avoided, and evolved, until it went ‘Back to the Future’. It is a collection of studies compiled from experience and research conducted over twenty years of involvement in taxation law in rural and remote Australia.

Australia’s history is sprinkled with attempts at tax reform — some successful, some not. Mixed Fortunes explores these efforts at substantive change in our tax system. Paul Tilley takes us from the establishment of the Australian Constitution at Federation in 1901 and the 1942 unification of income tax, through the seminal Asprey review in 1975 that set up the major tax reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and up to the lack of tax reform, at both the Commonwealth and state levels, this century. Mixed Fortunes examines the roles of foundational reviews, which establish the case for reform, and determinative reviews, which implement reform. It assesses both the political economy issues of policymaking and the quality of the tax reforms that have been achieved in Australia. The key questions it addresses include: What makes a reform exercise work — or not? How do we assess the quality of Australia’s tax reforms? And what lessons can be drawn from these experiences to help shape future tax reform exercises?