Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased that the government did accept some of the opposition amendments, which improved the recovery of this bill. The opposition remains very ambivalent about this bill as a whole. Essentially we are adding a new layer of bureaucracy on business. It is an important layer of bureaucracy—I am not saying that we should not do it—but we are asking them to conform to this new bureaucracy and then coming to them and saying, 'You must also pay the bills for it.' I think that when you are providing a service directly to business that they require then it of course makes a lot of sense to recoup the cost to the taxpayer. But when you are asking business to just bear a bureaucratic burden on behalf of society—in this case, to combat the financing of terrorism and other illegal activities—then I think it begs the question about whether it is appropriate to get business to pay the bill for that. So we remain ambivalent about this bill, although we do believe that the acceptance of these two amendments makes it better than it was. In particular, the late payment amendment is due to start on 1 July, within a week, and it would have been quite insulting, I think, to run around and charge people late fees when the parliament is only just dealing with this about a week before the bill is supposed to commence. With these comments, the opposition does support the passage of the amended bill.

Question agreed to.

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