Sir Grappler Truth Teller OAM wrote on Mar 28^th, 2018 at 8:52am:



   greed greed and more greed...

pot calling kettle..

this is from 2015.


The opposition’s efforts to keep alive its politics-of-envy barrage in an attempt to tarnish Mr Turnbull’s image ignores the lifestyles enjoyed by Labor’s elite. While the wealth of individual Labor MPs is not in the stratosphere of Mr Turnbull’s self-made millions, the parliamentary salaries of four Labor frontbenchers who have joined the class-war assault — Ms Plibersek, Mr Dreyfus, Tony Burke and Andrew Leigh — mean they fall within the top 1 per cent of taxpayers.

Bill Shorten, who earns $360,990 a year and owns the family’s $842,000 home in Melbourne’s Moonee Ponds, takes home significantly more than the average worker on $79,767 a year.

His wife Chloe Shorten owns shares in Westpac and has a cash trust account at Goldman Sachs.

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Last year she started work at Calibre Group as head of corporate affairs, but she wasn’t among executives whose pay was disclosed in the engineering company’s annual report.

Mrs Shorten’s father, Michael Bryce, is a successful businessman, running a graphic-design company that designed the Sydney 2000 Olympics logo. He wound up the business in 2010, during his wife Quentin’s time as governor-general.

Ms Plibersek’s salary is $307,329 and her husband, ­Michael Coutts-Trotter, takes home $532,300 as the head of the NSW Department of Family and Community Services.

Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman accused the Coalition of engaging in a “pattern of supporting tax avoidance of multinational companies’’ and “reducing the transparency around people’s private companies with turnovers more than a hundred million’’ while Mr Turnbull was “investing in a notorious tax haven”.

“We’ve got a Prime Minister buying into schemes that have a million-dollar US minimum buy-in, in a notorious tax haven and he’s trying to say, ‘oh look, I’m just like everybody else — we all do it’. I just think it is extraordinarily out of touch.”

For many Labor MPs, who rose through trade union or party positions, their taxpayer-funded incomes and entitlements are substantial. Tony Burke, as leader of opposition business, earns $248,790; other Labor frontbenchers earn $243,912 a year.

Unlike many of his colleagues Mr Dreyfus entered parliament later in life after a lucrative career in the law. The former Labor-aligned QC, who would have earned about $8000 a day at the Victorian Bar before entering parliament in 2007, made it on to BRW’s rich list of politicians back in 2010. He was placed fifth behind Mr Turnbull, Kevin Rudd, Joe Hockey, and former Liberal MP Barry Haase. Five years ago BRW estimated his private wealth at $4.2 million in shares and property.

Canny buying has built the Dreyfus family a property portfolio likely to be worth millions.

Mr Dreyfus and his wife, Deborah Chemke, own a family home in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, which they bought for $268,500 in 1988.

They also own a unit and a carpark in a red-brick block of flats in South Yarra, bought for $686,500 in late 2013.

Ms Chemke’s investments include half of a vacant block of land in nearby Camberwell with another woman, purchased from Mr Dreyfus’s father, composer George Dreyfus, for $150,000 in 2010, and a property close to the beach in the Victorian surf coast town Aireys Inlet, bought for $591,000 in 2006. She is also a director of the Chemke family’s metals trading company, Unimet.

Through his Kenley Dale self-managed super fund, Mr Dreyfus has stakes in 18 funds, including one run by Mr Turnbull’s old employer, Goldmans Sachs.

The Goldman Sachs Australian Infrastructure Fund is one of four in which Mr Dreyfus has a stake that describes itself as “wholesale” — a term that usually limits investment to people with net assets of more than $2.5m or income of at least $250,000 a year. A minimum initial subscription of $50,000 is required to buy units in the fund, which invests in infrastructure companies.

In 2010, Mr Dreyfus told parliament he had investments in the GVI Global Industrial Share Fund. The fund requires a minimum initial $500,000 investment. He no longer uses the fund.

Labor senator Sam Dastyari kicked off the attack on Mr Turnbull in the Senate on Wednesday, saying the only reason people invested in the Cayman Islands was “so they do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us’’.

“This is not fair, and it is not right,’’ he said.

Senator Dastyari and his wife Helen, who works for the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, bought the family home in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Five Dock for $1.36m in 2012. She also owns an investment property in Cammeray, on the north shore, purchased for $447,500 in 2006.