Australia: Still a client state in a corporate empire

From British imperial control to multinational corporate dominance, Australia’s economic independence remains more illusion than reality. Dr Evan Jones continues his three-part series — read part one here.

CONVICTS, whaling/sealing, wool and gold began White Australia. Mid-century gold brought a dramatically enhanced immigrant population and urbanisation.

There developed pressure to enhance a domestic manufacturing sector and infrastructure to employ the urbanised population, led by Victoria, with the protective tariff (customary at the time) as the main weapon. This “nationalist” impulsion was naturally meshed with ongoing union with Britain, with the expectation of further British investment on Australian soil and British people’s immigration, both of which occurred.

After 1945, Australian funds continued to be held in British Sterling. This aided Britain but was a drag on Australian economic recovery, with the needed USD in short supply. (Australia started abandoning Sterling only during the 1960s, dramatically after 1967 when the pound was devalued, with formal full abandonment occurring in 1971.)

In the early 1950s, the Brits would not let go. Britain, via its media (especially the influential Economist), was insisting that Australia concentrate on what it was good at (“comparative advantage”), which was agricultural production. Australia should up its agricultural production for the sake of Britain and the Commonwealth countries.

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Dependence on the protective tariff for manufacturing development was always problematic and it came under sustained criticism from the mid-1960s. The desire for more sustained development and to aid in offsetting perennial pressure on the trade balance, post-World War II governments committed themselves to resource exploration and mining development.

The 1957 Trade Treaty with wartime enemy Japan was seen as a “nationalist” measure for greater economic autonomy, but it soon opened the door to subordination to transnational mining and energy. U.S. capital was in like Flynn (such as Utah coal).

The scene was set soon after with the development of massive bauxite deposits at Weipa, Queensland, by Comalco (jointly owned by Rio Tinto and Kaiser) after 1963. The 1957 Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation Pty Limited Agreement Act appropriated Indigenous land for the occasion, allowing for a 500 square mile expansion (restoration of title occurred only in 2024).

Soon after, Comalco and Japanese bauxite importers collaborated in a transfer pricing arrangement, via a Hong Kong shell company, to reduce tax payments in Australia. The Comalco strategy was a trailblazer. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese trading companies, mediating all Australia-Japan trade, kept Australian export prices low through cartelised buying and honed the transfer pricing technique.

General Motors didn’t have to worry about transfer pricing. Induced to locate in Australia after World War II with a government bank loan (and cheap purchase of local car body manufacturer Holden), GM created the auto company model by not listing locally. Its iconic Holden car was manufactured behind tariff barriers and all profits went overseas, with (until belatedly) no requirements to report on their scale.

Large-scale uncontrolled foreign investment and takeovers of local firms (including agricultural properties and urban commercial properties) led to a pronounced nationalist instinct for greater control. A Foreign Investment Review Board was created in 1976, but it was never robust and it has long lapsed into quietude and acquiescence.

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Transfer pricing, using various dodgy but still legal mechanisms (intellectual property charges, intra-corporate lending interest payments), is of course a global problem, but the Australian Taxation Office (with international collaboration, especially the OECD) has yet to find the means to up the tax take.

Among the corporate giants paying no or trivial tax in Australia in 2023-24 (the year previously here) are:

JBS Global Meat;
AGL (Australian energy retailer);
Ichthys LNG (Inpex, Japan);
TotalEnergies EP Holdings (France);
Santos (Australian energy producer);
Singapore Telecom (Optus telco);
Liberty Holdings Australia;
Transurban (monopoly parasite toll road operator);
News Corp (Murdoch);
Microsoft;
Netflix;
Amazon;
Dell;
Ford Australia;
GM Australia; and
Persol (Japan, recruitment company).

Liberty Holdings is the ultimate “parent” company of Liberty Steel (Whyalla Steelworks). It is currently in administration, having been administered remarkably indifferently by Liberty supremo Sanjeev Gupta, receiving government assistance because of its crucial significance to the South Australian (indeed the national) economy.

Liberty pays no corporate income tax because of its structure (“trust silos”), legitimised in a Federal Appeal Court judgement in 2024, yet simply a rort. By contrast, Australia’s other steel manufacturer, BlueScope, cops a standard tax bill (23 per cent in 2023-24).

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Of Inpex’s giant Ichthys (early Christian allusions?) project, Michael West Media reports:

‘According to Australian Taxation Office transparency data, INPEX’s Australian entities have booked more than $36 billion in revenue over the past 11 financial years. Over that same period, they have paid less than $500 million in corporate income tax. In many years, they paid nothing at all.’

The Brazilian JBS, the world’s largest meat producer, will be a major beneficiary of the bizarre Mercosur trade deal being pushed by Brussels bureaucrats and German industrialists, that spells disaster for European agricultural producers (especially French) and for the health of European consumers.

JBS also owns Tassal, one of the salmon farming companies destroying coastal and estuary water courses in Tasmania. Tasmanian Richard Flanagan’s 2021 book Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry tells the story in all its gory detail. Nothing has changed since 2021.

Indeed, Prime Minister Albanese, in February 2025, disgracefully gave the rotten and rotting industry (the three main producers are foreign-owned) his full blessing. This was to shore up a Tasmanian electorate three months before the May 2025 Federal Election. Jobs for workers are important, but at what price when environmental disaster and climate change catastrophes beckon (old growth forest felling, coal mining, gas production)?

The Albanese Labor Government keeps granting consent to fossil fuel projects as if there is no tomorrow. Former Labor Western Australian Premier Carmen Lawrence noted (mid-November 2025) that, since taking office in May 2022 (re-elected in June 2025), the Federal Labor Government had approved 32 fossil fuel projects and another 42 were already lined up for approval.

In particular, the Government gave approval for an extension of Woodside Energy’s Western Australian gas project, one of the world’s largest, to be extended to 2070 (in effect, forever). Approval is formally linked to emissions reductions and protection of nearby Indigenous sites, but the conditions are dodgy and unenforceable.

Apart from the adverse impact on climate change, heritage and species protection are token. In 2020, Rio Tinto cynically destroyed 48,000 year-old Indigenous sites at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia’s Pilbara, with state and federal approval. In January 2026, the Albanese Government’s Environment Minister, in his approval of Korea Zinc’s windfarm in central Tasmania, incorporated a table that lists the species and numbers that the company can kill each year (and with no provision if the company exceeds its “limit”).

Then chroniclers of Australia’s neo-colonial status, Greg Crough and Ted Wheelwright published Australia: A Client State in 1982. Nothing has changed in the meantime.

This is part two in a three part series. Read part one HERE and stay tuned for part three, published tomorrow, Saturday 28 February.