Looking after our own backyard
While it's enticing to follow the intrigues of raids on far-flung offices, and international joint action, in the end Australia's successes in netting tax depends on its own laws.

We're in the middle of a raging tax reform debate, but there's surprisingly little discussion of how laws might be changed to monitor more effectively the way multinationals do business.

Government tax advisor and academic Tony Rumble says what the government and industry have in mind doesn't go much further than the goods-and-services tax (GST).

He says multinationals just don't feature in their plans.

"I think it's pretty obvious that it's being very narrowly restricted, and it's all about tidying up rorts in our domestic system," he said.

"But let's have a look at the magnitude of the offshore tax avoidance. Why that's not on the agenda I think is one of the big questions that we'd ask."

Moving money
Stare long enough beyond the horizon of a tax reform debate dominated by the GST, and you'll discover another world.

It's a world inhabited not only by multinationals, but by smaller business, super funds, banks, and the mums and dads are there too, thanks to the Telstra float.

You'll find you're looking at the financial markets. There you have many opportunities for moving money, using what are called financial instruments.

Rick Krever says those opportunities are exploding.

"Not that many years ago we had shares which were called equity, and loans or debt, and they were the only two instruments you had.

"You either issued shares or you issued loans to people, and loans could be called debentures or bonds or just normal bank loans, but there were basically not many instruments out there.

"In the last decade there's just been an absolute explosion in types of financial instruments,

"So that all new types of options we had and derivatives, and derivatives based on derivatives, so that all these new things suddenly appeared on the scene and the accounting profession worldwide and governments worldwide have been struggling to keep up this explosion of new financial instruments, "And nowhere have they done it successfully, the Canadians, the Americans, the New Zealanders have all brought in legislation to try to recognise some of these things for tax purposes.

"We've had some proposals in Australia to do something about it, but at this point we haven't legislated anything and we're just so far behind business in this respect that we haven't dealt with the first types of derivatives and they're on to the eighth, ninth generation of them.

"So that we're really running to try to catch up with business in this area."

Despite the huge changes that Rick Krever talks about, our tax laws don't even feature words like derivatives, futures or options.

NEXT: New world of finance