What we learned, Tuesday 30 May
That’s where we’ll leave the blog for today – thanks so much for joining us. Here is a wrap of the day’s biggest stories:
A gunshot fired into a Macquarie Fields primary school classroom in Sydney midday was “without much weight behind it”, being stopped by a blind after shattering a window. The incident is being investigated and there were no reports of injuries to any students or staff at the school.
Demolition work has begun on the century-old Sydney hat factory that was destroyed in a once-in-a-decade blaze, as police speak with a fourth teenage boy over the incident.
Senator Mehreen Faruqi has revealed she has “experienced racism in the Greens” as leader Adam Bandt declined to rule out that the party had received complaints about alleged racism beyond one expected from Lidia Thorpe.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made a stirring voice plea during a speech in Adelaide, saying all Australians would wake up on referendum morning with “the strongest sense of ourselves”.
Meanwhile, the independent senator Jacqui Lambie has threatened to disrupt the Senate “every hour for two weeks straight” unless the government releases more information about the potential stripping of medals from former commanders of Australian special forces in Afghanistan.
Promised pay rises for NSW frontline workers will be funded by a two-year freeze on the wages of state politicians and public service senior executives.
In continuing PwC news, Defence officials revealed that Defence currently has 54 current contracts with PwC with a total contact value of about $223m.
Updated
No tax lost due to PwC breach: ATO
The Australian Taxation Officer commissioner, Chris Jordan, has just given an opening statement about how it became aware of PwC’s alleged breach of confidentiality.
Jordan said the ATO became aware in 2016 of a “handful of multinationals suspiciously and quickly seeking to restructure” in response to a new multinational tax avoidance law.
Jordan said the ATO commenced a number of reviews and audits. It was hampered by inappropriate claims of legal professional privilege. The ATO was concerned by “artificial schemes marketed by PwC” and discovered a matter of “significant concern” in the Collins matter, a potential breach of confidentiality, he said.
Jordan said the ATO lacks “criminal investigative powers” so was not able to investigate further because the breach of confidentiality was “not a tax offence”. It referred information to the Australian Federal Police in 2018 and 2019, and formally referred it to the Tax Practitioners Board in July 2020.
Jordan reassured the community “we got on top of this early ... we stopped any tax loss from this egregious behaviour”.
Jeremy Hirschhorn, the second commissioner, said this was because the two or three companies which had restructured reversed those actions, and other companies proposing to decided against it.
