In Australia, a ‘dunny’ is an outside toilet, and anyone with a simple grasp of cause and effect knows that you cannot get rid of the smell by repainting the dunny door.

Things are not so simple in the reified atmosphere of our corporate boardrooms, particularly when the CEOs get together with their branding consultants. From those elevated positions of power, repainting the dunny door can achieve miracles, or so it might seem.

The whole notion of branding is an anachronism, a hangover from the sophisticated thinking and action in the medieval period, crudely and simplistically adapted by today’s robber barons. Flags, emblems, and heraldic devices formed a useful social function in their day. If you were a serf—one of the lower orders—these graphic devices told you who had the power to grab part of your crop, and when it was appropriate to get out of the way. They were the tokens of real power, the power of life and death. Of course, if you believed in sympathetic magic or certain religions, you might also believe that the power was embodied in the tokens themselves. But fast forward to today’s secular scientific world, without the power of magic or religion—without the real power over life or death—and these devices have no ‘effect’ on us lower orders. They are the trivial graphic baubles of contemporary capitalism, and we treat them as such.

Not so our large corporations. In Australia we have just experienced a classic case of the re-branding myth being played out in front of us.

Our largest bank—the National Australia Bank—has gone through a particularly smelly period, and the smell still lingers. If it were not for the fact that they have lost massive amounts of shareholder money, it would make good satire: a bank making bad investment decisions and losing money by dodgy financial deals. Should we trust this lot with out hard-earned savings? Hmmm.

Anyway, once the old orders fell on their swords (suitably jewel encrusted and padded to avoid causing injury), the new order came in to get rid of the smell. And what is one of the first things they did? They repainted the dunny door. They changed their name from ‘National’ to ‘nab’.

Only, we lower orders are not quite in the same relationship to the robber barons as we were in medieval times. The power relationships have shifted. We sniff the air to see if the smell is still there. Has anything really changed? Being simple folk, we ask ourselves some simple questions: have they just opened a new branch or placed an ATM somewhere that is useful to me; do I have to wait less time in a queue to do a simple transaction at the counter, or to talk to a human being in their call centre; are their statements easier to read and make sense of; are the letters they send me clearer; can I use their web site more easily; do they charge less than their competitors? The answer to all these questions is a resounding NO. The odour endures.

So weak is the branding effect that, moments after its release, it was being parodied. One letter to the editor of our local newspaper pointed out that the colloquial use of the word ‘nab’ as defined in the Australia Macquarie Dictionary is ‘to catch or seize, esp. suddenly’. The writer went on to say how refreshing this was, with a bank finally admitting how it behaves towards its customers.

Sometimes the best thing for a smelly organization to do is to take a low profile and stop continually reminding people of the smell. Or, to use a different metaphor, one of the most effective methods of avoiding continually shooting yourself in the foot, is to stop pulling the trigger. I offer this advice as something of a footnote.

But the bottom line (as it were) from a customer perspective is the smell. So perhaps the best strategy for our corporate barons is to get rid of the smell, improve the comfort and amenities, and then—and only then—repaint the dunny door in celebration of the achievement.

It seems everyone is redesigning the Australian taxation system. In the last few months there have been rumours that a US academic has already done it for us; also rumoured is that the Australian Treasurer and some of his officials designed it on a sheet of butcher’s paper when they came back from holiday. Less rumoured is the announcement of a study to compare the Australian taxation system with other such systems in the world.
(http://comparativetaxation.treasury.gov.au/content/default.asp)

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has a long tradition of navel-gazing, so much so that it once put out a tender document to communication consultants inviting them to help it ‘position’ itself within the Australian community. Hey guys, you’re the Tax Office, you collect tax!

Looking at taxation systems in other part of the world may on the face of it seem like a welcome break from the navel-gazing, but I suspect not.

It may come as a surprise to all those well-meaning Treasury and ATO officials and those commissioned to undertake this latest study that they are looking in the wrong place.

Whatever may be happening in other parts of the world, in Australia the ATO is only peripherally part of the Australian taxation ‘system’—albeit a powerful part, but a marginal player no less. In keeping with government policy, the ATO has outsourced most of its activity. It has gone on permanent institutional dialysis.

It has outsourced the complex administration of the system and the collection of taxes. Every individual taxpayer and business in Australia now administers the tax system. Instead of a few thousand people in Canberra administering the system for us, millions of us, every day, throughout Australia, run the system for the ATO—and pay for the privilege.

Instead of dealing with the complexity internally on behalf of taxpayers, the ATO has thrown at each us an administrative manual in the form of the appalling TaxPack and other execrable documents and just told us to get on with it. If we don’t, or if we make a mistake, they throw another type of book at us. The ATO sets the administrative rules and procedures, polices us to make sure we follow them, and then penalises us when we break the rules. (Somewhere in there is a denial of natural justice.)

What some individual tax payers and most businesses do is pay others to administer the taxation system for us—accountants and bookkeepers who stay up-to-date with the ever-changing administrative and legal complexity, keep the records, do the calculations, collect the taxes, and hand them over to the ATO. Estimates vary, but the cost of this part of the tax system is at the very least 10 times the cost of running the ATO.

The ATO has even distanced itself from its obligations to us as citizens and taxpayers by calling us ‘clients’. No wonder it needs consultants to advise it on its ‘position’.

The ATO under strong government direction has long since abrogated its responsibility for our taxation system. What hubris to now suggest that it or the Treasury is going to redesign the system when they don’t even pay for it or run it.

As you may gather, I am not impressed—from which you should not assume that I am anti-taxation. Far from it. I think I am extraordinarily privileged to live in a country which collects taxes and distributes them for the common good. There are countries where this does not happen, and generally they are not nice places for ordinary people to live in. But by forcing us to run a taxation system that is onerous, undignified, and Kaffkaesque, our government does a considerable disservice to us as citizens and tax payers. What should be a privilege has turned into a privation, undermining the long-term trust between citizen and state.

So, to those people charged with the task of redesigning the Australian taxation system, can I suggest that you redefine its boundaries and the ATO’s ‘position’ within that, and start by looking in the opposite direction to the navel.