A truck with a billboard slamming Gilmore MP Ann Sudmalis has been travelling through the electorate in recent weeks.
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Mrs Sudmalis is the target of a new campaign calling on the Turnbull Government’s failure to crackdown on multinational tax dodger ExxonMobil.
Australia Tax Office (ATO) data released in December revealed that ExxonMobil, for the third year in a row, paid zero corporate income tax in Australia on total income of $24.8 billion.
The campaign, which includes robocalls, radio ads and billboards in the Gilmore electorate, will run in the lead up to to the Federal Budget being handed down on May 8.
Make Exxon Pay spokesperson Jason Ward hoped the campaign would “push Mrs Sudmalis and her Coalition colleagues to take a harder line against Exxon and other multinational tax dodgers”.
“Ann Sudmalis claims she and her Coalition Government have been getting on to tax avoidance by big companies, but Exxon has not paid a single cent in company tax since the Liberals came to office,” Mr Ward said.
In a statement this week responding to the campaign, Ann Sudmalis said “The information is untrue” and that the campaign seeks to “fool the general public with robo calls with patently untrue information”.
“So far with the changes to legislation, we have collected an extra $5 billion in tax revenue. We are leading the world in anti-avoidance legislation, adding a 40 per cent tax rate to profits being sent overseas,” Mrs Sudmalis said.
“We’re working with other organisations for economic co-operation and development to make sure information sharing catches all the tax dodges.”
Mrs Sudmalis said more than $12 billion in petroleum resource rent tax since 1990, and an average of $450 million each year in corporate tax.
Mr Ward refuted those comments, saying it was “100 per cent true”. He said Mrs Sudmalis had made serious accusations about the “veracity of the campaign’s information and now she has to put up, or shut up”.
“We challenge her to disprove any of our claims, which are based on publicly available information from the Australian Tax Office and have been reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. We are surprised that an experienced MP would seek to dispute facts from the tax office of her own Government,” he said.
“Ann Sudmalis is too busy making excuses for a foreign multinational corporation to crack down on them, while our local schools and hospitals are desperate for funding.
“Ann Sudmalis has not asked a single question about Exxon’s tax dodging in her five years in Parliament.”
The Make Exxon Pay Coalition is an alliance of community groups and unions concerned about corporate tax avoidance.