Mark Carnegie reveals the tax tourist within

“I have for some time believed that the Australian taxation system is tilted a little too much in favour of the upper end of income earners,” he wrote in a submission to the Gillard government’s tax forum in 2011. He wanted the wealthiest 15 per cent of Australians to pay 15 per cent more tax, through a range of measures such as family trust reforms or a cap on negative gearing deductions.

He was still banging the drum four years later in 2015, telling the then Abbott government that he had few delusions about its willingness to implement much-needed higher taxes. “Tax needs to fall disproportionately on the rich – everyone agrees on that now,” he told this publication then.

Antipodean Warren Buffett routine

But surely the amount of tax paid by the rich in an allegedly progressive tax regime is affected by their being able to do things like, say, lobbing a suit in the NSW Supreme Court to smooth over a few filing difficulties with an ex-wife? Or to easily relocate themselves to their luxury properties in jurisdictions such as New Zealand, among other wealthy migrants attracted by that nation’s lack of a capital gains tax?

While privately partaking of a legal tax minimisation strategy, in this case revealed only because his ex-wife stopped returning his letters, Carnegie simultaneously maintains his Antipodean Warren Buffett routine, proclaiming himself not the kind of businessman motivated solely by the lure of a dollar.

Others don’t know when to stop. Others are motivated by something “deep and dark inside their soul”, or the score of their personal net worth. Not Carnegie, who mused on The Australian Financial Review’s How I Made It podcast this month that everyone just wanted to pay off their mortgage, have a decent holiday, care for their parents into old age and give their kids enough that they can do everything but not so much they can do nothing. “Beyond that, what do you need it for?”

The podcast revived Carnegie’s favourite self-description, apparently first coined by John Singleton, that he had the good fortune to be born with both a silver spoon in his mouth and a chip on his shoulder. The chip may inspire him to do things such as funding the Australian Council of Social Service to model how to shield the poor from tax increases, or to engage in all sorts of other charitable endeavours. But the silver spoon, we’d suggest, has other priorities.