From the Sydney Morning Herald:
How could our leaders have made changes designed to “better target and strengthen the application of capital gains tax” without seeing they would later allow companies associated with the misleadingly-named Texas Pacific Group to make a billion or so dollars in profit from the sale of Myer capital-gains-tax-free because they were registered not in somewhere like Texas but in the tax havens of Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands?
Barnaby Joyce was one of the very few to point to the emperor’s clothes.
“It is quite clear that not only are we about to pass a piece of legislation that discriminates against Australians but we are doing it at the behest of other people in other corners of the globe,” he told the Senate. “This legislation is going to be sneaked through. Do you know that today we have overseas equity firms that in the United States have put in a bid for Home Depot of $100 billion? They have the ability to remove $100 billion from the share market and the Labor Party is quite happy for that investment to be tax free.”
Both parties were happy about it. They said other countries exempted foreign investors from Capital Gains Tax in the belief that they would pay it in their country of residence.
It seems not to have occurred to them that that country of residence could be somewhere like Luxembourg, without Capital Gains Tax.
It occurred to Barnaby.
“I will give you one place. It is not very far away and people might have heard of it: New Zealand. New Zealand has no capital gains tax, so you can launch from New Zealand, come into Australia, buy up Coles, hold it for a year, sell Coles, put your money in your pocket, take it back to New Zealand and not pay one cent of tax – and that is something you are agreeing to today.”
Barnaby Joyce is the subject of near-universal derision and smearing by Rudd Labor and the mainstream media when it comes to so-called “economic credibility”.
Yet, he is far better qualified than the entire Labor economic team. And he has shown time and again, that he may be the only Australian politician with any basic, practical commonsense. He is always right on the economic ball.
Quite unlike economic illiterates such as Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, who does not even bother to keep track of Australia’s public debt position – he recently got it wrong by $6bn in an interview – and claimed that he did not have time to “dot i’s and cross t’s” in the disastrous home insulation debacle.
Barnaby is right.
Barnaby Is Right 
He is the only one with any guts.