Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Revenue) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to do that, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I apologise to the clerks for the confusion. The amendment reads as follows:

... “whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House: calls on the Government to align the definitions of facilitation payments under the Criminal Code and the Income Tax Act 1997 and to refer this matter to Standing Committee on Economics, Finances and Public Administration for urgent inquiry”.

The tail end of that motion underscores Labor’s reasonable and responsible approach to this issue. As concerned as we are about AWB, I do not want to necessarily make this an AWB issue. The Cole commission will deal with that, and we will find out in good time on what basis AWB made the deduction. Of course it made the deduction. But it would be even more extraordinary if it had made the payments off the books and the directors had failed in their fiduciary duty to claim what they were obviously claiming was a legitimate expense. That would be even more extraordinary. We know that it was claimed. There has been an admission now to the inquiry that a claim was made, but we do not yet know what form the writing off of the expense took. We are very hopeful that the Cole commission will unearth the details of just how that took place.

We can deal with that as we come to it. It has to be said that it appears that everyone in the world knew that this had been happening over the last five or more years. You would have thought that someone in the government would have been alert to the fact that there was a possibility not only that it was happening but also that a deduction was being claimed, which meant that the Australian taxpayer was subsidising these kickbacks to Saddam’s regime to the tune of about $90 million. These are pretty extraordinary circumstances. But, again, let us separate AWB out for the moment. Let us instead use question time to tease out these issues with the government. Let the Cole commission delve further into the tax arrangements and let us see what comes from that.

This amendment is about looking forward, not backward. On that basis I do not think the government can claim that this is a stunt on the part of the opposition or a means of further embarrassing the government, because it is not. This is not about AWB. This is about making sure that in future the facilitation payments provision of the tax act is not preserved. I do not understand for a moment why the government would not support that, particularly given that the OECD has expressed real concern about our failure to live up to our international agreement and wind back the extent to which these facilitation payments are claimed.

I invite the government to support Labor’s second reading amendment. We will be sending it to a division to test the government’s will on this issue. If they are not prepared to support the second reading amendment I will have no choice but to go back to the original intention—the one I was tempted to use when first considering this amendment—of a second, in-detail amendment putting forward exactly what we propose in the alignment of the two acts and to give the government, on reflection, another opportunity to support that proposal.

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