BotW: Netflix – a billion bucks and not a dollar in tax
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Friday afternoon and this morning in beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania. My apologies that we’re a little later than normal; crunching the ATO numbers we talk about below took a lot longer than I anticipated.
Today: Digging deep into the tax transparency data, and what it tells us about the state of Australia’s media players. And why ARN Media shareholders are the ones winning the merger mania.
Happy World Pets Day for tomorrow.
It’s your last chance to sign up to a paid membership of Unmade and lock in all of the current benefits. Later this month, we’re going to stop accepting new paying members of Unmade. Instead we’ll be offering membership of an expanded Mumbrella Pro as we bring the two brands closer together.
My key takeouts – Nine’s $2.1bn of local costs are ludicrous, and Seven needs better accountants if they paid the same tax as Nine on nearly 30% less profit!
Infuriating indeed Tim! Whilst there’s doubtless consumer good that comes from the majority of services and key media owners have been either complicit in, or exposed to their likely demise, there’s no escaping the fact that our market, as a consequence of their rise has either lost utility or incurred cost compensation for aggressive market entry. Loss of investigative journalism, diminished local production investment, loss of key classified markets, destruction of the taxi industry, control and shifting of accomodation booking, data and analysis drift, cloud and elastic computing and their inherent market values (with tax payers often on the hook for compensation) and earning capacity for the public purse have all drifted and been allowed to drift off shore.
If we dare mention tariffs/levies we are declared an enemy of America – a country where there are diminishing values in being its friend. A spine in the govt would be welcome in order to help correct a few of these one sided and all too obvious traits and leakage – is anyone paying attention?