Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Service Economy, Small Business and Independent Contractors) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. The Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007 contains three main provisions. The first relates to Operation Wickenby, which is an investigation into tax avoidance or, perhaps more properly described, alleged tax evasion activity. It allows the Commissioner of Taxation to disclose taxpayer information to Operation Wickenby task force officers and to officers of future compliance operations. This is a measure to assist the tax office in its investigations into suspected tax evasion and tax avoidance activities. Labor has a long record of supporting measures that are legitimately directed at protecting the revenue base—measures by the tax office to ensure that people pay their fair share of tax.

I said Labor has a proud history, and I certainly will not go right through the postwar era, but I wish to point out that it was Labor in opposition that dragged the then Treasurer and now Prime Minister of Australia kicking and screaming to the dispatch box when the number of memoranda prepared by the Treasury in the late seventies and early eighties had become so voluminous that they could no longer be hidden from the public gaze. Those memoranda related to the assault on the income tax base perpetrated by bottom-of-the-harbour schemes, wet Slutzkins, dry Slutzkins—all sorts of imaginative schemes—into which members of the Liberal Party were up to their snorkels.

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