Program: Why PwC complained about this UOW professor
Linkedin Associate Professor Andy Schmulow’s Post
Good news!!! The majors are dying. Bought by, and sold to, Coles Group, Woolworths Supermarkets, Qantas, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB, Westpac, PwC, KPMG Australia, EY, Deloitte and the Australian Banking Association (ABA), they’ve lost the trust of “we the people”. Sure, they’ll try to regain it with pork barreling and PR spin, incapable of realising that that sh1t doesn’t wash anymore. Independents in Parliament will change this equation and restore democracy for the people, by the people, of the people. Particularly delighted to see Michael Sukkar is set to lose his seat. Had the Liberal Party of Australia won the last election he would have implemented his plan to sack Michael O’ Neil, CEO of the Tax Practitioners Board, because he refused to stop pursuing PwC Australia for tax evasion. And the whole country would have been none the wiser about the biggest corporate scandal in living memory. PS fun fact: guess where Michael Sukkar worked before becoming a politician? PwC of course!!
Why this PwC and big bank agitator is running for the Senate
Law academic Andy Schmulow has had enough. Big companies are too powerful and corrupting democracy, he argues. And he wants to ask them the hard questions.
Andy Schmulow is fired up. His gripe? Companies are too big and too powerful. So much so, they’re threatening democracy’s foundations, corrupting politicians and bureaucrats with excessive lobbying and generous donations.
The legal academic and corporate provocateur is channelling his anger by running for the Senate in the upcoming federal election.
He’s representing the Australian Citizens Party. Its members are mostly a cynical bunch, disillusioned with the major political parties and the free market. Its flagship policy is the creation of a government-owned bank using the branch network of Australia Post.
“Democracy is dying because people have lost faith in government and its institutions, and you can’t blame them,” Schmulow says. “I believe in liberal, individual-centric, free market democracy – but we are losing that.
“I am getting messages from a broad range of people, saying they don’t like what they are seeing: people are becoming cynical and seeing democracy being taken away from them by big corporations.”
He laments legislators captured by lobby groups like the Australian Banking Association and Financial Services Council, and a revolving door between Treasury and the banks. He wants an end to corporate political donations, and says those from individuals should be capped to reduce the influence of billionaires.
“I have become deeply distrustful of the Treasury, where there is a cabal wanting to revolve into high-paying jobs in industry and not rock the boat.”
“I don’t want to sound like a lefty Marxist – I’m an avid free marketeer – but what I am seeing is corporations tending to monopoly behaviour.”
As an example, he points to the bad drafting of the Financial Accountability Regime. He provided evidence to a parliamentary hearing that the key section in the law, which creates the obligation on executives not to turn a blind eye to misconduct, does not have any sanction. Fines were removed after lobbying from the bank lobby, making the regime ineffective.
An associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Schmulow is an expert in financial regulation. He has provided evidence to several other parliamentary inquiries during the last term of parliament, including on bank closures in regional Australia – which called on the government to consider creating a public bank – and oversight of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
He’s a vocal critic of accounting firm PwC, the supermarket duopoly and the major banks. He remains flabbergasted ANZ was sanctioned last year for charging fees to dead customers as recently as 2023, five years after the royal commission called out similar misconduct.
ASIC is unwieldy and ineffective, he argues, and should be broken up. APRA doesn’t focus enough on competition. He is a fan of giving the competition regulator divestiture powers over big companies and says opposition leader Peter Dutton is spot on arguing for a break-up of supermarkets and insurers.
The election explained
“I don’t want to sound like a lefty Marxist – I am not: I am an avid free marketeer – but what I am seeing is corporations tending to monopoly behaviour. The reason we have oligopolies and monopolies in this country is not because there’s something different in the water, it is because we don’t have a competition regulator that can break monopolies up,” he says, in an interview in Sydney.
“We know we are being gouged. We don’t need another task force. We need to break up Coles and Woolworths and go back to Coles, Woolworths, Safeway, Bi-Lo, Franklins. There are 14 major supermarkets in Europe, and 12 in the United States.”
Winning a Senate spot is a long shot; the fringe Australian Citizens Party has never won a federal seat. In the 2022 election, its previous Senate candidate for NSW only pulled 13,000-odd votes. Schmulow will need at least 300,000 votes in NSW to be in contention; maybe twice that to win.
Labor senator Deborah O’Neill. James Brickwood
He’s committed to running again in 2028 if he doesn’t make it this time around. The party, which is also running Senate candidates in Victoria and Western Australia, has raised around $2.5 million in the past year, from 15,000 individual contributions. It only has around 2000 paid-up members, but it plans to increase this and has a mailing list of 60,000.
Schmulow says he would thrive grilling chief executives and regulators in committees he thinks are far too soft. In the Senate, he admires Labor’s Deborah O’Neill, especially her pursuit of PwC (“she is outstanding, but hamstrung by her caucus”); the Greens’ Barbara Pocock, independent David Pocock, and Liberal Andrew Bragg are also effective interrogators.
But beyond that, he reckons parliamentary committees don’t go hard or deep enough, allowing chief executives to duck and weave. “The public wants to see accountability and parliamentarians asking the hard questions, and not giving up and not giving in. You have to be on the front foot the whole time.”
Part of his motivation to run has been the scrutiny on PwC, which complained to the University of Wollongong last year about Schmulow’s posts about it on LinkedIn – a dispute he won. It’s only strengthened his resolve. “The reason PwC makes so much money on tax advice is because they actively promote tax evasion, and they have done this all over the world,” he says. (The firm emphatically denies this allegation.)
If he doesn’t win the seat, he plans to agitate at annual general meetings as he builds a profile for another run. Testing the water, he turned up at the AMP shareholder meeting earlier this month, grilling the board on its remuneration triggers.
