Investigative business journalist Michael West, who was recently told by The Sydney Morning Herald his skillsset wasn’t “aligned with Fairfax strategy going forward”, this morning launched his new website — a home for the journalism he has every intention of continuing even though he no longer has one of Australia’s major media companies behind him.
West’s latest investigation was due to run in the Fairfax papers the week after he was sacked (a term he uses — Fairfax says it was a redundancy). He took the story with him. It’s live this morning on both his website and The New Daily, which has syndicated it. It looks at the role of the big four accounting firms — PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young — in both facilitating tax minimisation for their clients and advising governments on how to combat it.
“They are both architect and engineer,” says tax insider George Rozvany in West’s investigation. “They sell the (tax avoidance) schemes to the multinationals; and in the case of the LuxLeaks scandal last year, they arranged the deals in secret with government, to the detriment of all other sovereign nations and their taxpayers”.
Speaking to Crikey on Friday, West said he had no doubt the investigation would “ruffle a few feathers” and help pull together the links in the public’s understanding of global tax minimisation schemes.
“Over the past four years, the public’s become aware that multinational tax avoidance is a big problem. Conservatively, it’s one trillion US [dollars] into tax havens a year, which is slipping out of the grasp of Western governments. We know the companies doing it — most are household names.
“What hasn’t been clearly identified to date are who are the those who engineer the scam and so on. And that’s the next leg of the stories.”
This has been West’s bread and butter for years at Fairfax, and he says stories on tax avoidance and minimisation have always struck a chord with a wide readership. So have stories on the energy sector — another area West plans to keep reporting on. He’s hopeful he can figure out a business model to keep doing what he did at Fairfax independently,
On the business model, he says he’s got a few ideas but is coy on the specifics. He says he has a potential backer, but it’s early days.
“I will take contributors, I will syndicate, and I will look to do special projects for particular funding as well,” he said. “My state at the moment is zero income, small child, large mortgage.”
On the website’s name (michaelwest.com.au), West seems ambivalent. “I always wanted to make story first and not myself. Unhappily, Fairfax have somewhat made me a martyr for the crime of journalism.”
When news of West’s departure from Fairfax was broken by Crikey in May (his was one of several dozen redundancies as Fairfax looked to cut costs in editorial), hundreds of figures in media and politics were quick to offer their support. West says his phone ran hot, but he doesn’t think it was entirely about him. “I think my sacking became a symbol of what’s happened in the mainstream media, and of disappointment with Fairfax,” he said.
“I think in this area of the media, there’s such a hole now. You have Fairfax being gutted of experienced journalists in this area. There’s very few people left who can read a balance sheet, very few who have the courage to go after big corporate stories.”
Though he is quick to point out Adele Ferguson is still at The Age. When he got a tip, West recalls, he’d often ask whether someone had also approached Ferguson. “We were rivals and colleagues,” he said. “But still, there’s very few people left to prosecute these kind of stories.
“I think there’s a big public need for it.”
While Fairfax are busy culling experienced investigative journos it would be useful to know if any board member or executive has a chauffeured company vehicle.
The proclaimed reason for Fauxfux shedding so many investigative journos. has always been ‘cost cutting’.
Anyone else think that it is something more basic – gutlessness and kow-towing to the bigar$ed end of town that does not appreciate such lese majeste?
Great news to hear the Mr West is looking to try and keep going at what he does as well as any journo in Australia. Reading that he was leaving the SMH was pretty much the last straw for me, like they held up a white flag and pronounced that they were no longer doing journalism for the people.
Only Ross Gittins, Adele Ferguson and Kate McClymont still left there, of the old hands that make the paper worthwhile.
I’ll be following you Michael.
And Malcolm Knox. Mind you, Peter Fitzsimons kind of cancels him out, I guess.
West combines a sweeping strategic understanding of how the corporate world operates, in all its increasingly opaque complexity, oodles of patience and technical expertise, and an appetite for gleeful street-tabloid head-kicking. The reason Fairfax ditched him is of course because this trifecta is simply incompatible with comfortable corporate self-delusion (Fairfax’s existential quintessence, now), at a moment when the inherent structural contradictions of neoliberal economics are finally tearing its own accepted orthodoxies to shreds. This Big Four story is classic West, a ‘hiding in plain sight all this time’ expose of stuff we kind of knew but have largeely adroitly avoided thinking about too much, because the logica systemic implications are so seismically destructive. And it’s put together not by some tinfoil conspiracy nutter running on cheap amphetamines and manic tics, but a corporate finance expert lately turfed from a highly-respected position of corporate media leadership. The ‘mainstream’ body politic can only go on amputating its own ‘gangrenous’ constituent limbs like this for so long, until what remains of its carcass can’t look like anything else anymore but the true lunatic, ragtag holdouts, ship-wrecked on the lonely shoals of its ideological obsessions. This latest bit of exposed Pythonesque decadence at the heart of the big end of town makes it impossible – like West’s cracker stories this last few years on tax avoidance – for any sane, reasonable person to keep faith in the capacity of the corporate sector to self-correct, to avoid falling fully apart, sooner rather than later I’d say, due to rotting from within. What scares Fairfax is that their business model eggs have long been in the same general basket as the B4 Accountants, the big banks, the global leviathans that are so often West’s subjects, and (I think) a main underlying theme: this doomed growth-fetish belief that you can and must just keep rearranging the systemic deck chairs, squeezing more profit out of your own tail-chasing structural thimble-and-pea tricks (like, as here, simultaneously advising both tax avoiders and tax avoider-catchers, for double cash own), hacking away, cheapening, devaluing…the one thing or things (genuine products, real services) that might make you a sustainable value-adder. In Fairfax’s case…journalists just like Mike West.
D’oh.
This systemic death spiral will be the main game in journalism hence, reckon, demanding peeople who can surf the technically diabolical intersections the political and corporate worlds: macroglobal finance shifts, domestic fiscal policy choices, revenue capture v. investment competiveness…and lots and lots of crucial stories to be covered on corporate malfeasance v. democratic (government) regulation, policing, prosecution. It’s so absurd it makes you laugh: Fairfax sacking a journo like Michael West aboutt now would be like The Washington Post sacking Woodward & Bernstein on, oooh, say, June 18 1972…for having a skillset that was ‘not aligned with their White House coveraage strategy going forward’..!!
SMH currently charges I think $3.50 a week for unlimited online access, MW. Crikey sub is about $4 a weeek ($16/month). Me, I’d be very happy to stump up $5 a week – or say, $20-25 a month, for your stuff alone. Bonus if you can rope in a few freelancers and hungry intern-type Comms or Media students, perhaps interested in positioning themselves as the next generation of finance reporters (seriously, THE next main medi game, and it sure as sh*t won’t be an internal cadetship at News or FF et al that’ll set you up, kiddies…). I see MW’s site has got around 1500 content subscribers already interested in the free feed, so if you could harvest even a third of those as paying punters, that might get you up around (500 x $20 = ) $10,000 a month just on subs…admittedly not exactly reliably aligned with a ‘mortgage-paying strategy going forward…’, but hey, dude, welcome to the cool, cool world of the renegade gun-slinger.
Good luck anyway, mate. More power to you.
Jack – pleeeez, a few more paragraphs and sentence separation would make your excellent contributions physically easier to read.
En-bloc they come across as written in GREEN INK WITH CAPS!
Ouch; yah AR, tortuous even by my standards, soz all. Time for a sabbatical mefinx.
No, no, please don’t go – your posts are never less than pertinent and mordant.
Just hint ‘enter’ occasionally.
MW’s sacking is a huge loss for the SMH and I wish him every success with his new venture.
I read that the priority for SMH was to hang on to Hartcher, McLymont and Fitzsimmons.
Of those three I’d plump for Kate and wave goodbye to the two Petes while reinstating Mike Carlton and most importantly MW ! Ross Gittins would continue with economics and Mark Kenny will suffice for pollie waffle. I presume Switzer and Reith provide their opinions free of charge to “further the cause” as they wouldn’t get a zac on my watch.