U.K Study Tour - Day 2

A small group of us were lucky enough to have the morning off, so we had the chance to explore London! We began at the iconic Tower Bridge (not to be confused with the far less impressive and misleadingly named London Bridge), before stopping by the Tower of London, which is home to the Crown Jewels. On our way to St. Paul’s Cathedral, which has sat at the highest point of the City of London for over 1,400 years, we visited the Monument to the Great Fire of London. This monument is 62m tall and was designed to be this height to resemble the distance between the space and the bakery where the Great Fire was thought to have originated in 1666.

The middle of our day was broken up by a scheduled reflective session with all of the students on the tour. During this session, we discussed the new things that we were exposed to during our classes at Queen Mary’s, and sorted some plans for our day-trip to Oxford coming Friday. It was a good opportunity to hear about the experiences of the other students, with the consensus being that the courses were advanced and challenging, but extremely interesting.

We also had the opportunity to sit in on Tax System Design and Policy in Emerging and Developing Economies. This lecture was taken by guest Lydia Sofrona, the Director of Legal Services at the Independent Authority for Public Revenue in Greece. Lydia spoke of the need for a good tax administration governance framework in the context of the Greek Tax Administration, which was reformed over the last decade. We found that governance and taxation are mutually reinforcing, that is to say that good governance promotes a good tax system and vice versa. The Australians in the room were able to take a little bit of personal pride in our own tax system, which was described as one of the three most effective systems in the world. We felt extremely privileged to be able to hear from the proverbial horse’s mouth how the entire Greek taxation administration has been transformed over the last decade and the lessons that had been learnt.

The evening was spent at a FA Cup football match in North London between the Tottenham Hotspurs and Southampton. This match was hosted by Tottenham in their new state of the art stadium and was attended by over 60,000 diehard football fans. Not only was the match hotly contested and thoroughly entertaining, but the atmosphere was unlike anything else in the world – it was 90 minutes of pure passion and adrenaline. The quality of the match equalled the quality of the atmosphere, with the match ending 3-2 to the home team Tottenham after South Korean superstar Son Heung-Min converted a penalty in the dying minutes of normal time.

Wed 5^th Feb 2020 – Authors: Neil Pfeiffer & James Jakubowski