DOJ charges 'Bitcoin Jesus' with $48 million tax fraud, seeks extradition courtesy of Michael C
Industry veteran Michael Croker retires from CA ANZ
CA ANZ Australian tax leader Michael Croker has announced his retirement after 40 years in the profession.
CA ANZ has announced that Michael Croker will retire from 1 July 2024 after almost 12 years at the association.
Croker is a well-respected voice in the Australian tax landscape and has held a variety of roles across CA ANZ, University of Sydney, PwC and the ATO during his 40-year career.
“I commenced in the profession in 1983 in the month prior to the Hawke/Keating partnership arriving in Canberra, and after more than 40 years it’s time to pass the baton to someone else,” said Croker, commenting on his retirement.
“I still remember the momentous tax changes announced by Labor on 19 September 1985 – including capital gains tax, dividend imputation, fringe benefits tax, and the denial of entertainment deductions.”
Croker said broader tax reform now seems impossible with taxpayers left to grapple with incessant tinkering to a tax system much in need of a major overhaul.
“My sincere hope is that the long-held goal of a ‘joined-up’ tax and transfer system will one day be achieved, enabling the majority of individual taxpayers to enjoy a streamlined, ’light touch’ engagement with government agencies which other countries have managed to successfully design and implement,” he said.
Croker also thanked the many chartered accountants who have shared their ideas, experiences, and frustrations about Australia’s tax systems with the CA ANZ tax team.
“I’m also grateful to the many officials in Treasury and the ATO for their engagement with CA ANZ,” he said.
Simon Grant, group executive of advocacy and international development at CA ANZ, said Croker will be greatly missed.
“Michael has made an enormous contribution to the profession, and as a result to sound policy development over many years,” Grant said.
“At the forefront of his thinking has always been those who work, day in and day out in tax practices, whether for large firms, small to medium practices or as part of the management of businesses and not-for-profit organisations.
“Our members will miss his tireless support for them, as will those who Michael worked with throughout what has been an extraordinary career,” Grant said.
CA ANZ will announce Croker’s replacement before his departure on 1 July.
Stella Prize
They have announced the winner of this year's Stella Prize, an Australian prize awarded: "to one outstanding book deemed to be original, excellent, and engaging" and written by a woman or non-binary author, and it is Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright.
See also the publicity pages from Giramondo, New Directions, and And Other Stories, or get your copy at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.co.uk.
I do have a copy of this and am looking forward to getting to it.
Literature is the heart and soul of each country and can help develop greater understanding.
Reviewed by the New York Times in February, Praiseworthy was hailed as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, an appraisal the Stella chair of judges, Beejay Silcox, concurs with.
“Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel,” Silcox said in her statement.
“And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.”
In September, Praiseworthy won the University of Queensland fiction book award. It has also been shortlisted for the Queensland premier’s award for a work of state significance, the prestigious €100,000 International Dublin literary award, and the James Tait Black memorial prize, the UK’s oldest prize for literature.
Alexis Wright said a lifetime of studying literature from across the world enabled her to understand how she “might write the book that I wanted to write”; a book incorporating 60,000 years of storytelling and an unswerving scrutiny of contemporary reality; a book whose “vision is dark, humour tar-black, narration irrepressible, language roiling and rococo”, according to Guardian critic Declan Fry.
“It has an Aboriginal consciousness in it but it has a worldwide literary consciousness,” Wright said.
“Praiseworthy’s been developed through really deep thought and hard work over a long period of time, with many, many false starts and reworking and reworking and until I’m absolutely sure that every page, every part of that book stands up and won’t fall over.
“And it’s what I’ve hoped to achieve … to broaden the literary landscape here, to produce a work that’s right for our times here in this country and right for the times across the world.”
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf & Time of theMagicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger are reviewed by Richard Nigel Mullender
