Martin Feil Author

Martin Feil was born in 1947 in Sydney. While attending university for 13 years (10 years part-time) on a scholarship, he got his first job in the Customs department, and then became the Tarriff Board’s youngest project director at the age of 26. He was eventually responsible for 11 major industry inquiries, before striking out on his own and working as an industry-policy consultant for the next 30 years. During that time he also owned trucks, warehouses, customs bonds-stores and container yards, and worked for the Australian Taxation Office as one of the few Australian independent experts on transfer pricing and profit repatriation by multinationals. He has been chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accountants’ customs committee, and the institute’s representative on the tax office’s transfer-pricing subcommittee. Feil has written many op-ed pieces over the years for The Age, accompanied by illustrations by John Spooner, warning of the dangers of free-trade ideology. He is also the author of The Failure of Free-Market Economics (Scribe, 2010).