Milking It

Whale has a very good post on his blog today about Dairy Farmers who pay fuck all in tax.

The aver­age dairy farmer is pay­ing less tax than a cou­ple on the pen­sion – rais­ing ques­tions about whether the sec­tor touted as the back­bone of the econ­omy is pay­ing its fair share.
As the Gov­ern­ment pre­pares one of the tight­est Bud­gets in recent years, cut­ting into middle-class fam­ily ben­e­fits and KiwiSaver sub­si­dies, new fig­ures sug­gest those cuts will hit peo­ple who are also shoul­der­ing the great­est tax bur­den – wage and salary earners.
Inland Rev­enue Depart­ment fig­ures pro­vided to Labour rev­enue spokesman Stu­art Nash show that, in the lat­est full year for which fig­ures were avail­able, the aver­age tax paid by dairy farms was $1506 a year. The 17,244 reg­is­tered as being in the dairy sec­tor, includ­ing com­pa­nies, trusts and indi­vid­u­als, paid only $26m in tax.
The fig­ures also show that more than half – 9014 – reported a loss for the 2009 year and another 2635 reported trad­ing income of between $1 and $20,000.

This is a major hit for an up and com­ing Labour MP. An issue that mat­ters, and for fol­lowers of global pol­i­tics a straight copy of the Uk Uncut protests that are rail­ing against cor­po­rates dodg­ing tax while the state sec­tor is being cut. The Farm­ing sec­tor are really cor­po­rate bludgers. If it rains they want hand outs, if it snows the hands come out, when prices are low they cry poor and when prices are at a record high they struc­ture their affairs to appear to be pau­pers. Mean­while they fill our rivers with cow­shit and expect to get water for free.