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They had reluctantly accepted Gail. When we took Nicholas as a baby to their apartment, my mother said how surprising it was to have four grandchildren. Eva, she said, would have been jealous. (Despite having married young and having four children, my mother’s deceased sister Eva had no grandchildren. As a child, Eva had danced naked with the postman’s children around the hose at Eidsvold.)
My mother may have been having small strokes. She occupied herself with sewing, and Diana noticed she was stitching in the wrong places. One day she had a massive stroke and lost the power of speech. I wondered whether she recognised me when I held her hand in hospital. I was writing children’s stories and began reading these to her. She seemed to respond by gripping my hand.
She did not speak again and was taken to a hospice. I do not know if my mother, who was so quiet with strangers, could hear a demented old woman in the next bed, shouting and calling out all day. If she did, it must have been a torment – listening to these endless rages. My mother may have been put next to this woman because she appeared insensible and in any case could not complain. I continued reading her children’s stories, talking about what I was doing, sometimes coming with the older children and holding her hand. But her grip was weakening and her eyes did not seem to register anything.
For some months I drove with my sister to the hospice. One afternoon we were standing by my mother’s bed and Diana asked, ‘Do you notice anything different?’ I was puzzled by my sister’s question. ‘All the tubes have been removed.’
My mother was still breathing. She looked strangely free. Diana had told the hospice to take her off life support. I was silently grateful I had not been consulted. Iris died that night and we visited her next morning in the mortuary. Diana placed a kiss on her forehead and said, ‘Goodbye Mother’. I stood by and said nothing. We walked out.
Diana, my children, Gail, a few family members, and Robert Gray came to the crematorium chapel. I was the only person who spoke: about her childhood, her father’s death, the difficult years that followed, how she would have liked to be a singer, and her coming to live in Sydney. I sensed that my sister hated every minute of the eulogy as she sat in the small funeral chapel. Her grief was real.
Even when my mother died my impatience about her ‘silly ideas’, the trivial frictions of family life, were still too raw for me to feel grief. I did not understand how much she was still Bella’s victim.
At about the start of the Great Depression Bella conceived the hare-brained scheme of moving to Sydney to be close to Billy, her eldest surviving son, who was single. Now more than sixty years old, she insisted on the move, and Iris had to come with her. Bella uprooted my mother from family and friends and the famil iarity of Melbourne. Bella herself was leaving two of her children behind, her youngest son Tom, recently married, and Eva who had children. I find this incomprehensible, particularly abandoning her grandchildren.
Perhaps Bella saw Billy’s absence in Sydney as a personal rejection. Rejection by a male is unsettling for women such as Bella. Whatever happened, Bella discarded rationality in pursuit of her son.
Not long after the two women settled in Sydney, and perhaps before, Billy got a girlfriend whom he later married. ‘Eileen threw herself at Billy’, my mother told me, still upset about it more than twenty years later: ‘Billy had only just started seeing Eileen … and after work he used to find her sitting in his car!’
The move to Sydney was a fiasco. Bella and my mother could not compete with Eileen Mumford. Neither Bella nor Iris, as far as I can ascertain, ever formed an intimate friendship in Sydney (apart from Iris marrying Leo). For more than forty years Sydney was an alien city for my mother, and the last sentence of Bella’s ‘Recollections’, written several years after their move is: ‘And now I am alone’.
Tony Rainer (Billy’s son) told me, ‘My father had to come to Sydney if he was ever going to find a wife. None of his girlfriends were good enough for Bella. And my mother wasn’t either. Photographs show the hostility. This only changed when Bella found out the Mumfords owned country stores.’
The spell between mother and son was broken for me when Iris told me she had spoken to the mother of the girl next door, and I was to stop playing with her. The girl and I did not speak again. Our friendship had been innocent. We continued living in adjoining houses, and for years neither of us acknowledged the other when we passed in the street.
I never forgave my mother for this exercise of maternal power. She may have told herself she was doing the right thing. She did not want to share her ten-year-old son with a ten-year-old girl.
Diana had no formal legal training, but was working in the Probate Office and prepared all our mother’s probate documents. Iris owned a house in Glebe – the house Adrian Heber was going to burn down when he was at a party there – and I purchased Diana’s half share. A couple of years later I was having difficulty making payments under the mortgage I took out over the house. I sold it at auction for less than the value Diana and I had assumed when I bought her share. She insisted on refunding what she claimed was my overpayment.
Since our father’s death Diana had invested her spare cash in rental properties, several over a decade and a half, and was able to pay for these out of a modest income. She and Iris lived economically – without large expenses such as a car.
Diana had unpredictable expenses on her rental properties and began selling them off and investing in the stock market. She was a joiner – she joined the Australian Shareholders’ Association, and although her purchases were limited, subscribed to Choice, a consumers’ association, as an act of good citizenship. She had almost no vanity and would not have described it in this way. But she had a forceful personality. About five years after our mother’s death, at a time when she was having dinner at the Lindfield house on a weekly basis, Diana and Gail had a falling out. Diana stopped visiting Lindfield and I began meeting with her for lunch in the city two or three times a month.
By that time Gail and I had a second child, something we had always wanted, but felt we could not afford. There was a chain of lucky events, and Harold was literally ‘a child of tax reform’.
I became a tax lawyer by accident. I had seen tax as dry and technical. When tax law was offered for the first time to under-graduates in the early 1960s, I dismissed it as having nothing to do with me. My spotty law degree – once a source of perverse pride – was a problem now I was a legal academic. So I took on a ‘hard’ specialisation: tax.
I was surprised. New cases and new legislation were continuously replacing old law. Tax law was proliferating into specialisations. There was a battle of wits between revenue authorities and taxpayers. The ‘progressive income tax’ was good at redistributing to the less well off, but high rates were killing off initiative. There were trade-offs between simplicity, efficiency and fairness. Tax was an exhilarating morality play. It was technical, but not dry.
I wrote an article, ‘The Income Tax Judgments of Sir Garfield Barwick: A Study in the Failure of the New Legalism’. I had met Barwick once at a student dinner, and had thought him a decent and courteous man. But his income tax judgments as chief justice of the High Court broke with existing precedents. Barwick was a judicial activist pretending to be a literalist. I did a mathematical analysis of his income tax judgments, adopting a methodology from the social sciences. I used income tax judgments of fellow High Court judges as the control group to show Barwick’s extreme pro-taxpayer bias.
His casuistry had stripped any practical effect from section 260, the general anti-avoidance provision. With high marginal personal tax rates, this caused an explosion of tax avoidance. Driving to the university, I noticed an expensive car with the numberplate ‘TAX 260’, and another with the numberplate ‘TAX 000’. It was the beginning of personalised numberplates. I saw a young man in a suit waving to a young blonde woman driving past in a navy blue late model Mercedes. Her numberplate was LXIX. It took a couple of minutes before I realised: LXIX was soixante-neuf.
Barwick’s proposition was a bearer of falsity, but in this way he had a permanent influence on how tax legislation was drafted in Australia. The immediate response to his corrosive logic was convoluted legislation plugging obvious gaps. I argued this would have been unnecessary if his court had not neutralised the general anti-avoidance provision. His ‘new legalism’ was a pragmatic failure as well as bad jurisprudence.
This appeared so when my article was published in 1983. But there was a longer-term effect. Over the next twenty years Australia developed a unique style of tax legislation: detailed rules that needed intensive bureaucratic input and consultation with tax professionals outside government. By the year 2000 about 300 bureaucrats were involved in tax reform. Australia finished up with some of the world’s most sophisticated tax legislation. Initial compliance costs were high, but much of it worked well after the settling-in period. Barwick was the catalyst.
When the Hawke Labor government was elected in 1983, Australia got an inspirational Treasurer: Paul Keating. Following on from a Tax Summit, a cascade of tax legislation – capital gains tax, fringe benefits tax and many other measures new to Australia – was about to descend on the accounting firms; they had to educate staff and clients.
I knew Allen Robinson, national head of tax of one of the large international accounting firms, and in late 1985 he telephoned: Did I want to become his national technical tax director? I said no – I was happy with academic life. I telephoned Gail. She told me I was mad – I could take leave from the university. I called Allen back. Early in 1986 I started with his firm. Gail and I could now afford to have Harry.
I prepared courses for the firm’s staff on new tax legislation, gave client presentations and wrote client brochures. One of my press releases, which suggested a capital gains tax provision had an anomalous effect, became front page news in the financial press and the legislation was amended. I was given a bonus.
I was walking past a government publications shop and bought a copy of the recent Research and Development Tax Concession legislation. I gave a press interview suggesting it could be abused, and was telephoned by a government official. We were commissioned to review the concession and I wrote a seventy-page report. My suggested amendments were legislated. I became a member of the government committee set up to oversee the concession and was now an R&D tax expert, writing submissions for industry associations and reports for clients.
In 1987 I was at a course given by two American partners of the firm where I worked. I asked one of them what he did during the day. He said he sat in the firm’s national office in Washington and charged his time answering phone queries about tax from the firm’s offices around the US. Ten years went by and then I assumed a similar role in another firm.
The editor of Australian Business, Trevor Sykes, a legendary journalist who wrote the ‘Pierpont’ column about shady entrepreneurs, took me to an Indian lunch. I began writing a weekly tax column for his magazine. I was chastened when my first column appeared. My article had to fit on a page and was about 200 words too long. I was used to book reviews of no fixed length. The sub-editor simply excised three paragraphs near the end, and my last paragraph now made no sense.
In 1985 Australia had a National Tax Summit and was lucky to have a young Federal Treasurer, Paul Keating – a connoisseur of antique French clocks, Mahler symphonies and Italian suits – who enthusiastically drove the program of radical tax reforms that came out of the Summit. He was hoping to take over from Hawke as Prime Minister. The main threat to Paul Keating’s moving into the Lodge (the prime minister’s Canberra residence) was a charismatic Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, a Ferrari-driving former professor of economics.
I wrote articles for the 1988 and 1989 Christmas issues of Australian Business, composed mainly of limericks, in which Paul Keating had a dream. In the Christmas 1989 article I imagined Keating had a dream about a second Tax Summit. Here is an extract:
The Second Tax Summit – Paul Keating’s Annual Dream
… The Treasurer found himself addressing a second Tax Summit in the Irish town of Limerick, on the banks of the River Shannon. … [T]he Italian suited Treasurer told the delegates, ‘… some of my cabinet colleagues are straying from the true religion of the level playing field. They want tax concessions. Well, here we are right next to Shannon Airport, deep in tax concession land. Ladies and gentlemen, I have brought you here so that you can see with your own eyes a countryside that is devastated by tax concessions.
‘Just to bring home to you the horrible economic distortions that I’ve witnessed on my fact-finding mission through this depressed country I’ve composed a limerick.
In my clapped-out Mercedes Benz
I’ve been touring the bogs and fens,
But Irish whisky
In excess is risky.
They don’t air-freshen the Mens.
John Elliott [recently retired CEO of Fosters Brewing and former President of the Liberal Party] suggested they adjourn for a snort or two of Fosters in a nearby hostelry. ‘That’ll be entertainment taxed at only 39 per cent too,’ he added with a chuckle. As they did this, Dr Hewson, [the leader of the Federal Opposition] much to the dismay of his retired president, did not order the Australian drop, but a glass of Armagnac. The bar tender, an avuncular fellow, filled the opposition leader’s glass and recited:
‘God bless you, ex-Professor Hewson,
It’s easy to see you’re new son.
We don’t drink shandies
And fancy French brandies.
It’s clear you don’t know the right brew son.’
The bar spontaneously broke into a chorus:
‘He’ll need to get a new Ph. D.
There’s a lot of value-adding in a spree,
With numerous stops
At hops and barley shops
To pick up our depressed economee.’
The last line, particularly the second last word, caused our Prime Minister [Bob Hawke] to drop a blow-wave dryer he was holding in one hand and a pint-glass of lemon squash he was holding in the other [he was temporarily a teetotaller]. Tightening his lips, he scowled:
‘While I’m PM that word
Is a sound that must never be heard.
You say you’re recessed,
And I’m quite impressed,
But that other word’s quite absurd.’
As the drinkers cowered, ashamed of what they had sung, all the doors of the pub were flung open and forty men in dark suits armed with flick knives and stilettos burst into the room, accompanied by press photographers. ‘It’s a Tax Office raid!’ some of the leaders of business said, ducking for cover behind the bar.
‘My parents didn’t call me Trevor Percy Winston Boucher [the Commissioner of Taxation] for nothing,’ the leader of the dark suited brigade announced. ‘Stand up like a man and pay your tax!
‘Just because you’re at the top
Won’t cause my auditors to stop.
Corporate squeals and screams
Excite my audit teams
To bring their axes out and chop.’
‘Really, this is all very uncivilised,’ Barry Jones [author, Labor parliamentarian and Quiz King] announced. ‘You’re all frightened because his name means butcher in French.
‘You all should learn to say
‘Bon jour, Monsieur Boo-shay.
Here’s my last écu,
It’s all I can do.’
And maybe he’d go away.’
As the leaders of business slowly emerged from under chairs and tables, peering at their French phrase-books, Paul Keating struck up a conversation with John Hewson. ‘You know John, your name lacks electoral appea
l. It’s too hard finding rhymes for it. Now my own name is perfect. I could go on endlessly:
‘My name is P. J. Keating,
I’ll give you a terrible beating.
The Lodge is mine,
It’s where I’ll dine,
So shut up and stop your bleating.
‘Now your own name, John, doesn’t have that Damascus steel edge to it. But perhaps if you change from Hewson to Hewsome, you could do more with it.’
John Hewson emptied his Armagnac as he listened to the Treasurer’s aspersions and visibly stiffened. Then he said:
‘No way that I’ll name-change to Hewsome,
I’d win some, but maybe I’d lose some.
I’d consider John Porsche,
And Ferrari of courshe,
But Hewsome’s a name that is gruesome.’
I stayed eighteen months with the accounting firm that recruited me in 1986. I was approaching fifty and needed a clear pathway to partnership. A friend, Gordon Cooper, helped me negotiate with another firm’s tax leader, Robert Oser, and I stayed there for twenty years, becoming a partner despite my age. Through a merger this firm later became the world’s largest international accounting firm.
Australian Business stopped weekly publication in 1991 and Paul Kelly, the editor of the Australian, asked me to write a weekly tax column. I continued writing these articles for almost a decade, and the firm was paid at normal journalistic rates. My standard fall-back when I could not find a weekly topic was to write a piece recommending a Goods and Services Tax (another name for a value-added tax, where tax is payable to each transaction in the supply chain).