We are told over and over again by the heads of business associations, the corporate media and Liberal politicians that decent pensions, health care and public education are unaffordable. They say instead that we have to “sacrifice” and “live within our means”.

The release of 11.5 million documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca has exposed this as a cynical lie. The grotesque greed, dishonesty and unashamed hypocrisy of the world’s wealthy elite have been laid bare, confirming what millions around the world already know: that there is one law for the rich and another for the rest of us.

The documents provide a rare insight into what becomes of the more than $6 trillion that goes “missing” from the global economy each year. Through the creation of shell companies in low tax, high privacy jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands, the wealthy are able to hide assets and avoid their tax obligations, with the beneficiaries being virtually impossible to trace.

More than 8 percent of global wealth is stored in these havens. This is money that could be spent providing life saving health care, infrastructure, clean running water or housing for the 2.8 billion people in the world who live on less than $2 per day. Instead, it is stolen and amassed in the hands of the super-rich elite.

Australian involvement

Eight hundred Australian companies and individuals have been implicated in the leaks. It is unclear how much this amounts to in unpaid taxes, but a recent tax office operation gives some idea of the scale of the fraud.

In 2014, Project DO IT, run by the Australian Taxation Office, provided an amnesty and heavily reduced penalties in exchange for companies and individuals voluntarily coming clean about tax avoidance. Despite the fact that only a “small number” opted into the scheme, according to the deputy tax commissioner, the operation unearthed $650 million in income and $6.5 billion in assets, all of which now seems like only the tip of a very large iceberg.

Rather than going after these fraudsters, the government has since moved to gut the Taxation Office, cutting more than 3,000 jobs, many of them senior compliance roles. One long-standing bureaucrat told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time that this was part of a government-led “lighter touch” in revenue collection: “Some very senior capable people are going out the door and there are some others who were pushed to the side because they were too ‘revenue focused’”.

It is no wonder that only 30 percent of large private companies in Australia pay any tax at all, according to the ATO, or that many more are free to engage in semi-legal tax avoidance schemes at their leisure.

The government also takes a light touch approach to other corporate crime. Last March, the federal attorney general’s office released a public consultation paper about better methods to deal with such crime. One proposal involves the introduction of deferred prosecutions for corporate criminals, whereby defendants are permitted to enter into a “voluntary, negotiated settlement” to avoid prosecution.

While the rich get a polite negotiated settlement and a gentleman’s handshake, working class people are charged for the most trivial offences – such as in 2009, when a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy in Western Australia was detained and charged with receiving a stolen Freddo frog.

And if poor people dare to deprive the government of funds, there is no light touch approach. At the same time as the government was implementing its go-easy approach to collecting tax from the rich, it was creating a special welfare fraud taskforce to crack down on welfare over-payments, i.e. payments that are made to the 14 percent of people in Australia who live below the poverty line. In the words of then social services minister Scott Morrison, this was necessary to send a strong message to “those who want to game the system”. The poor “game the system”, but the rich engage high end accountants.

The government is also proposing to empower border force agents to prevent people who owe money to Centrelink from leaving the country, and adding interest to their debts. Corporate criminals are subject to no such sanctions, despite the fact that the cost of corporate crime is more than five times that of welfare fraud. And, as the Australian Council of Social Services points out, only a tiny minority of welfare recipients commit fraud. In 2014-15 there were 1,366 prosecutions, or 0.02 percent of recipients.

The poor are forced to comply with their obligations while the rich are not, and yet government revenue is increasingly directed away from services that workers need and towards subsidising the already wealthy. At the recent COAG meeting, Malcolm Turnbull reaffirmed $80 billion in federal funding cuts to hospitals and schools, while pompously preaching – between $300,000 lunches, no less – the necessity of “living within our means”. Massive cuts to higher education spending and privatisation of crucial medical services have also been proposed on the basis that there is no money available for such indulgences.

And in the upcoming budget, Turnbull hopes to cut company tax so the rich can amass even greater wealth.

So while workers and the poor contribute disproportionately to government income, politicians use it to service the rich, through corporate tax cuts, military spending and business subsidies. Public money is funnelled towards the super wealthy who refuse to pay a cent of tax, while much needed social services are gutted. This is how capitalism works.

Liars, hypocrites, thieves

This hypocrisy is epitomised by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp. While his newspaper empire pushes hard for cuts to workers’ wages, the gutting of health and welfare services and making sure reactionaries such Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine have an amplified voice in Australian public life, the Murdoch empire is nothing but a tax-dodging criminal fraud.

University of NSW accounting academic Jeffrey Knapp last year calculated that Newscorp has paid income tax equivalent of 4.8 percent over the last 10 years – and on only 10 percent of its operating profits. In the last two years, Newscorp has siphoned $4.5 billion through elaborate tax avoidance schemes involving bogus dealings between companies all in effect owned by Newscorp.

Another Australian company exposed by the Mossack Fonseca leaks is BHP Billiton, which was accused last year of channelling earnings to Singapore, where it has a concessional tax deal with the government, which ensures it pays an effective tax rate of zero. This is the same company that led the hysterical and successful campaign against the former Labor government’s proposal to tax the super-profits of mining companies.

End the age of entitled impunity

Mossack Fonseca is only one company enriching itself through the unconscionable conduct of the rich. There are many more, and still more accessing these services.

It is time for them all to come clean. Every business executive, every politician, every newspaper editor – any and every member of the ruling elite that has told us we can’t afford services for workers and the income poor – should now be forced to show us what they’ve got and where it is stored. Every large company’s books should be opened up and gone through with a fine tooth comb.

It can no longer be denied that this money exists; it must be exposed. Those responsible or benefitting from this organised fraud must be expropriated and brought down, as the prime minister of Iceland already has been.

But good as this is and would be, seeing off a few figureheads won’t be enough.

The scale of the leaks indicates that the whole system is rotten. The entire global elite are nothing more than a cabal of well-organised criminals with no principles beyond their own enrichment. They are further proof that the system is stacked against workers and the poor and that it can never deliver justice or adequately meet the needs of the mass of working people.

Some will respond to the Panama Papers with a shrug because they expect no better from the self-serving elite, and haven’t for a long time.

It is up to those of us who are not prepared to tolerate this situation to do what we can to transform this moral indictment of capitalism into a political movement to overthrow it.

Ultimately, this must involve fighting for a socialist society, which puts the enormous wealth and productive capacity of the world under democratic control and uses it for the benefit of the majority, not a minority.