Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Naturally, to respond to some of the baseless accusations made by the member for Kooyong, I would point out that, as Keynes said, when the facts change I change my mind—what do you do? Over the course of the decade since I wrote an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, the Prime Minister has changed his view on emissions trading, on parental leave and, indeed, on co-payments, which he once, quite correctly, referred to as being a madcap idea.

To return to the issue of multinational profit shifting, the problem with this government is that it is not willing to do the hard work of tax reform. Labor in government worked up a $4 billion package to tackle multinational profit shifting, an issue which will only increase in importance in years to come because, as we increasingly move from being an agriculture and manufacturing economy to being a service based economy, it becomes more straightforward for firms to move the location of production. In that environment, we need smart tax laws that tackle multinational profit shifting. If we do not have those laws to tackle multinational profit shifting, it will end up being the most vulnerable Australians who need to pay more.

The reality is that Australia has an economy which is the envy of many in the world but which is being jeopardised by a government that wants to trash-talk the economy and bring down measures which hurt the most vulnerable Australians. We have worrying signs in unemployment, which is rising markedly and is now higher than the unemployment rate in the United States, and a government that, despite this, seems to think that it is all right to tell a young job seeker in Devonport that they have to go six months without government assistance simply because they have the misfortune to live in a high-unemployment area. Because the government does not get the fundamentals, and because it does not understand even what a progressive tax is, it has to resort to the sorts of cheap tactics that we have seen over the last five weeks.

The government should rethink its stance on multinational profit shifting. When government members stand up and say, 'What should we do instead of slugging low-income Australians?' the answer is to rethink their approach on multinational profit shifting. This dual-tax agreement with Switzerland is a good start, but the government needs to go further, have a holistic approach to multinational profit shifting and make sure that the tax base is fair, not made more unfair as this government's budget has done.

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