More than a third of the 1,539 largest companies operating in Australia paid zero corporate income tax in the 2013-14 financial year, according to the Australian Tax Office.

The list was revealed late in 2015 as part of the ATO’s Corporate Tax Transparency report.

ExxonMobil, Qantas and General Motors all feature on the list of 579 companies that paid absolutely nothing. Nappy maker Unicharm Australia came in at number 580. It reported $130.5 million in revenue, declared a profit of $10 and paid the princely sum of $3 in tax.

A worker earning $30,000 in the same financial year would have paid more than $2,000 in income tax.

News Australia Holdings, the parent company that publishes the Herald Sun, the Australian and the Daily Telegraph, listed $2.8 billion in revenues and paid not a cent of income tax.

Rupert Murdoch must laugh into his champagne when his papers publish story after story laying into dole bludgers and welfare cheats. Just days after the ATO released the figures, the Telegraph published a story attacking the government’s policy of writing off welfare debt after six years. (“Foreign-bound welfare cheats grounded under same laws that stop child support dodgers fleeing Australia”, 18 December.)

Transfield Services runs Australia’s refugee torture camps. It reported revenue of $2.8 billion. Tax bill? Zero.

The total combined revenue of the tax-free corporations was more than $400 billion. The corporate tax rate is 30 percent – in theory.

Assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer was quick to point out that just because some haven’t paid tax doesn’t mean that they are avoiding their tax obligations. “There are some reasons why it would be some companies are not paying tax at all”, she said.

That’s true. Politicians make sure of it by leaving lots of loopholes in tax laws. Reporting a loss, offsetting taxes with deductions and research spending reduces the amount that companies are required to pay.

Closing loopholes and instituting more aggressive auditing would be an obvious way to end the rorting. But the rich and powerful aren’t interested in that. They want companies paying less tax, and workers paying more.

As Kate Carnell, chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, wrote in the Australian Financial Review last December: “First, Australia must rely more heavily on consumption taxes, which will require states and territories agreeing to increase the GST rate and broaden the base”.