Men are Guilty!

A disturbing story of the trashing of the presumption of innocence. And what's tax got to do with it?

At the end of last month (August this year) I attended the Presumption of Innocence Conference. This very moving but disturbing one-day conference exposed a concerning ‘destruction’ of the presumption of innocence within parts of Australia’s criminal justice system. As individuals we might think the issue is remote from our daily lives. But the conference attested to how quickly and unexpectedly any one of us, or our loved ones, could become ‘victims’ of a system of state-orchestrated oppression.

The conference was about how, too often these days, men who are falsely accused of rape are effectively treated as guilty by virtue of an allegation having been made. The conference was on solid ground. The NSW director of prosecutions this year ordered a review of sexual assault cases following criticism from several judges. The judges suggested that far too frequently they have had to conduct trials of accused men where the cases had no merit. Further, that on the evidence (or lack thereof), the rape allegations should have been terminated early in investigations by police and/or prosecutors and charges should never have been laid, let alone ending up in court.

At the conference I listened, in particular, to the trauma of men whose lives and those of their families had been trashed. The men’s stories were all presented by the wives, partners or mothers of the accused men. The men did not speak. But what struck me was my reaction. I’ve heard and seen this all before. Not in the context of criminal law, but rather tax law. An odd connection you might think. Let me expand!

Look at the tax issue. Over the last 15 years-or-so I’ve campaigned for tax justice for self-employed people in particular. I’ve witnessed precisely the same behaviour—trashing of the rule of law and justice by public ‘servants’ conducting tax investigations/prosecutions as were being described at the conference in relation to the handling of false rape allegations. To me, it seems that there’s a ‘whole of government’ problem here.

Photo by Kaysha on Unsplash

There are a couple of basic threads to this comparison that relate to (a) how Australian laws are designed and (b) how ‘justice’ is administered. Let me explain by way of examples.

The Restoring Presumption of Innocence Conference

The conference driver was Bettina Arndt, famous during the 1970s and beyond as a clinical sexologist. She controversially broke social taboos of the time by publicly and frankly talking about sex. As a feminist she wanted women to discover the pleasure of sex. This involved an understanding of men’s sexual desires as well as women’s. Her years of couples’ sexual coaching gives her vast accumulated knowledge.

But some years ago, her focused shifted to men. She describes how “After years of becoming increasingly concerned about the demonisation of men in our society, (she) decided to devote all her efforts to men’s issues.” At the forefront of Arndt’s activities is her campaigning about the treatment of men facing false allegations of rape. In doing this she has incurred the vicious wrath of modern-day feminists. Interesting! Here’s one of the great libertarian feminists of the last several decades under major attack from the cabal of current feminists. What’s going on?

One of the presentations at the conference gives an indicator. The presentation gave statistical facts about family violence. These facts gave a different perspective to what the presenter said is the common narrative of family violence which claims that “…overwhelmingly most perpetrators (of family violence) are men and victim survivors are women, children and young people…” Further, that common narrative asserts that “men who claim to be victims are usually the perpetrators. Women who commit violence usually do so in self-defence.”

What was evident at the conference is the view that in a significant section of the legal community dealing with rape, the concept that men are the perpetrators of violence, is pretty much taken as a given. Further that this ‘men are violent’ concept has taken hold within the culture and approaches of the state-paid prosecutors’ offices. This certainly seemed to underpin at least some of the criticisms made by the NSW judges about that state’s public prosecutor’s office.

I don’t know and don’t make any allegations in this respect against lawyers or prosecutors. But let’s contemplate the idea that the ‘all violence is by men’ concept has taken hold in the culture—at least of government prosecutors’ offices. How in the world could such an idea take such hold as to override the application of the critically important idea of justice contained within the presumption of innocence? Many people might say that it’s the ‘woke disease’ taking hold! But I think that explanation is too thin.  

Marxism - again?

Rather I return to my learnings about modern Marxists. (Note, that I don’t want to keep harping on this, but these Marxists seem to keep popping up all over the place!)

Take US based ‘pinko’ group who describe themselves as ‘communism for fags’. Yes, it’s another activist Marxist organisation dedicated to the destruction of capitalism. Its policies and activities approach the destruction of capitalism from the perspective of a sex-based revolution—namely, the need to neuter masculinity. In its current manifesto, ‘Sixteen Point Platform and Program,’ in a section headed ‘What we Want’, it says this about men:

“The father physically enforces (upon the mother and children) the behavior necessary in a capitalist system…”

“….from that competitive attitude grows sexism, racism, male and national chauvinism…”

“Masculinity” has been defined by capitalist society as the amount of possessions (including women) a man collects, and the amount of physical power gained ….” 

What they want is “….to end this oldest form of oppression and its foundation — male chauvinism.”

There we have the ‘logic!’ Capitalism must be destroyed. Masculinity is about the physical (violent) enforcement of power which is the basis of capitalism. Therefore masculinity must be destroyed.

This is not my spin on what they say. It’s the belief they hold and upon which they act. It’s consistent with what I observed at the Australian Marxism Conferences 2023 and 2024.

Here, then, is the context which seems to me to explain why Bettina Arndt is under such vicious attack from modern feminists. What Arndt seems to be saying is that men are not violent as such, quite the reverse, although some men are violent. She doesn’t judge men (or women) as a class, but rather as individuals. This is where the clash occurs with the modern feminists who seem to me to be Marxist feminists. They say that men are violent as a class. That is, all men are violent. And this inbuilt, inherent, male violence is embedded in the nature of capitalism. Arndt’s position on men asserts the individuality of people. This is a different position from the world view held by the Marxist feminists that behaviour is pre-determined by class (men are violent - women are victims).  So Arndt she must be attacked.

If such conflict were confined to the rarefied field of academic journals and/or rants on social media, it would all be ‘interesting’ and nothing more. But the Presumption of Innocence Conference certainly provided evidence that the ‘men cause all violence’ Marxist ideology has taken firm root within at least some criminal ‘justice’ institutions in Australia.

How else can it be explained when, according to conference case studies of accused men, clear evidence of the men’s innocence held by prosecutors was withheld from the defence and the courts? I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that prosecutors have legal obligations to provide all the evidence to the defence and to the court. The objective of justice is to arrive at the truth, not to achieve convictions for the sake of tallying up a scalp count! To withhold evidence is to defile justice.

If and where prosecutors and police have succumbed to the ‘men cause all violence’ ideology and usurped or withheld the truth to achieve convictions, they have become, wittingly or unwittingly, instruments of the Marxist agenda for the destruction of capitalism.

Tax administration

What has all this got to do with tax law and tax administration? Why do I see a connection?

For a long time I’ve campaigned to reform how the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) conducts tax audits and treats individual taxpayers.

What is staggering to discover is that the legislative powers of the ATO entirely remove the presumption of innocence of all taxpayers. When the ATO conducts an audit and on its assessment an individual has a tax debt, then that ATO assessment becomes an actual debt at law. It is not an allegation of a debt, but a legal debt. The onus is on the taxpayer to disprove the debt. The ATO doesn’t have to prove anything. The presumption of innocence does not exist under tax law.

Further, what I’ve witnessed as routine behaviour from the ATO is the withholding of information from the taxpayer about why the ATO has formed a view of a tax debt. I have seen the ATO bankrupt people and destroy their lives when the evidence of a tax debt was plainly wrong. And I’ve seen (rare) situations where, after bankrupting people, the ATO has been forced to admit that it was wrong given the overpowering counterevidence from the taxpayer. But in the process the ATO has destroyed the financial, physical and the emotional lives of the people it has targeted.

I can spend hours going through the detail of such situations, which are surprisingly quite common, but hushed up by the ATO through the use of confidentiality agreements and so on.

The Link—False rape allegations—False tax assessments

Ordinarily, most of us tend to think that the presumption of innocence is supposed to apply under criminal law. In the case of the false rape allegations described above, it seems that a culture of presumption of men’s guilt has taken hold in some sectors.

In the case of Australian tax law, the presumption of guilt of a tax debt is written into the law.

Here’s the link. In the case of the perversion of the presumption of innocence in rape cases, that travesty seems to be largely a consequence of a culture amongst some prosecutors (and others). This leads to the withholding of evidence and the trashing of the truth.

In the case of tax law, the perversion of the presumption of innocence is written into statute. This enables, supports and engenders a culture within the ATO that leads to the withholding of evidence and the trashing of the truth.

But in both spheres, the harm done to individuals falsely accused is grotesque. People’s lives are ruined.

What’s to be done?

I’m a person who likes to explore simple solutions to complex problems if possible.

It’s a pretty tall order to change culture. Although the calling out of the prosecutorial problem by judges in NSW is a substantial (and appreciated) major step in the direction of cultural change.

Changing administrative tax law is, likewise, a formidable task.

But here’s a little trick I learned. In 2019, I spent some time in Washington DC investigating the laws and administrative processes covering audits and the collection of tax by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The US laws operate with the presumption of innocence of US taxpayers. The IRS must prove a tax debt. Both in the US and Australia, if a taxpayer disputes an initial tax audit, they can request an independent review of the audit. In Australia, it is quite common for the ATO’s ‘independent’ review to be conducted by the tax officer who did the initial audit. In the US, if the IRS officer who is conducting the review interacts with the IRS officer who did the audit, the debt against the taxpayer is automatically cancelled. That is, this simple trigger means that the review of an audit in the US is genuinely independent. In Australia there is no genuine independence.

Apply this sort of trigger to both the ATO and rape cases in Australia. That is:

• If in a rape case the prosecutor withholds any information from the defence and/or the courts, and that withholding is discovered, the accused is automatically determined to be not guilty.

• If the ATO withholds any information from a taxpayer disputing an alleged tax debt, the tax debt is automatically nullified.

Prosecutors, tax officers and probably many in government would be horrified by such laws. But here’s the point. Natural human behaviour in large organisations, particularly government organisations, is for the people in those organisations to be primarily concerned with their careers. Prosecutors and police will seek to achieve convictions. Tax officers will seek to collect tax. If permitted, the dynamic within such organisations can often lead to the perversion of justice. This is a fact of human behaviour.

What is needed are simple triggers that affect the career dynamics within such organisations. If a tax officer or prosecutor’s career could be at risk through the collapse of a tax case or rape case because the person withheld information, then the withholding of information becomes much less likely.

The object in both cases is the truth. If the evidence, all the evidence, warrants conviction for rape, then conviction should occur. If the evidence, all the evidence, warrants the finding of a tax debt, then the tax should be paid. But where the evidence does not support the allegation or where the evidence disproves the allegations, justice must find the individual innocent.

Note on the Presumption of Innocence Conference

There were two presentations that provided hard statistical evidence of violence in the family setting that paint a very different, even confronting, picture to the accepted narrative of men’s violence. Here are some brief notes from those video presentations.

Faking the Stats

• Children are most at risk of violence when in the care of mothers.

• Children are twice as likely at risk from mothers than they are  from fathers.

• “More substantiated emotional and sexual abuse and neglect cases involved children from female single parent families than from other types of families.” (at 5 min 38 sec).

• Of men abusing children: stepfathers and boyfriends of single mothers are more likely abusers than fathers. (8 min).

• Females account for over half of parental murder of their children.

   

True rates of domestic and family violence in Australia

• Men typically avoid/don’t report family violence against them.

• Of those people who report that they have been abused by a partner, 33.7% are men and 66.3% are women. (ABS stats – 10min 35sec)

• Of those reporting physical or emotional abuse against them, 39% are men and 61% are women.

• Of those who are killed by their partner or family member/s, 40% of victims are men and 60% are women. (12min 13sec)

• Young people report that when witnessing violence between their parents that it’s pretty uniform that both parents commit violence against each other. (16 min)