In 1974 in Kingston, Jamaica, aboard her yacht The Britannia, the Queen told me that ‘your Prime Minister had been ‘rude’ to my family.’ I was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet at the time.
Forgive me for mentioning it but when you read down you will understand.
The Queen complained that Gough Whitlam was rude to the lesser Royals
In political circles, the take-no-prisoners approach that ClubsNSW adopts towards anybody or anything that threatens its poker machine business has served the industry so well that diplomacy has become a lost art. But the peak industry group’s slurs against a terminally ill former employee last week have provoked pushback from a surprising quarter.
Former casino mogul James Packer says he is appalled by the way ClubsNSW has treated the compliance auditor who blew the whistle on the industry’s non-compliance with money laundering laws, accusing the lobby group of “ruthless unethical behaviour”.
ClubsNSW is suing Troy Stolz for breaching the confidentiality clause of his contractand separately launched a private prosecution against him for contempt of court. It said last week that Stolz had made himself out to be a saint when he was actually motivated by money. Stolz has inoperable cancer and is not expected to live longer than a year.
Packer said in a written statement to the Herald that he was “absolutely appalled” ClubsNSW was pursuing Stolz through the courts when it was aware he was battling terminal cancer.
“It beggars belief that ClubsNSW ... [hasn’t] yet worked out that this ruthless unethical behaviour is damaging the reputation of the wider clubs industry,” Packer said.
POKER MACHINES
No regrets, says Bob Carr, despite 'bargain with the devil' on poker machines
James Packer hits out at ClubsNSW’s ‘ruthless unethical behaviour’
One 2021 survey from the US, which included just over 1,200 participants, found 43 per cent had been subject to workplace bullying — mostly via video calls and email.
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Tax whistleblower case stalls over legal issue
Parties in the case of Adelaide tax office whistleblower Richard Boyle will prepare a set of agreed facts, after a judge today refused to first rule on questions of law in action seeking to block his criminal prosecution.
Lesson From The Tax Court: Don’t Confuse Dummy Returns With Substitutes For Returns
Nizan Geslevich Packin (CUNY; Google Scholar) & Sean Stein Smith (CUNY; Google Scholar), ESG, Crypto, and What Does the IRS Got to Do With It?, 6 Stan. J. Blockchain L. & Pol'y ___ (2023):
Regulation almost always lags behind innovation, and this is also the situation with many FinTech-based products and services, and particularly those offered by crypto industry players. The crypto sector is a new and innovative one, which has proven to be not only based on highly technical concepts, but also by high levels of volatility and financial risk. In attempting to understand how to address many of the issues it raises in legal fields ranging from to financial regulation such as tax requirements to environmental law, and specifically matters that relate to climate change and energy wasting, regulators often find themselves trying to implement existing legal frameworks rather than creating new, clear rules. Much has been written about the SEC’s regime of regulation by enforcement of the crypto industry, and the impact of this type of rulemaking on society, businesses and persons. However, other financial regulators adopting a similar style of rulemaking—such as the IRS—have gotten much less attention for the impact of their regulatory actions. One such notable example, which is relevant in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) awareness era, relates to the unintended consequences of the IRS’ regulation by enforcement, given the impact that such new rules have on the transition to greener energy.
Telles, Pedro, Existing and Potential Use Cases for Blockchain in Public Procurement (July 20, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4168144 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4168144
“The purpose of this paper is to assess the possibility of using blockchain technology in the realm of public procurement within the EU, particularly in connection with the award of public contracts. In this context, blockchain is used as an umbrella term covering IT technologies and cryptographic solutions used to generate consensus on a distributed ledger. The paper starts by elaborating how blockchains and distributed ledgers work in general, including the drawbacks of different blockchain models and implementations, before looking into recent developments for distributed consensus that may herald some potential.
As for public procurement, blockchain has been used in three real use cases in Aragon (Spain), Colombia and Peru, with the first two not passing from the pilot stage and the latter being deployed in production. These use cases are analysed with an emphasis in what can be learned from the difficulties faced by each project. Finally, this paper will posit two specific areas of EU public procurement practice that might benefit from the use of blockchain technology. The first is on data management and accessibility where current solutions have been unsuccessful, such as cross-border certification data as required by the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) and e-Certis or the difficulties with contract data collection and publication.
The second, on situations of clear lack of confidence on public powers, where the downsides of blockchain technologies and the costs they entail are an ad-vantage. Even considering these potential scenarios, the overall perspective is that the benefits of blockchain solutions do not really provide much value in the context of public procurement for now.”
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What kind of Republic? Who will campaign for it?
The passing of the Queen has reawakened the Republic issue. A quite varied number of responses appeared in the media recently. That is a most heartening by-product of a sad event.
