Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I take exception to a few things that the member for Lyne said, but I will address just one of them today. He said that tax law amendment bills are not sexy, but they actually are. I have said a number of times in this House that the tax law amendment bills and the tax and superannuation amendment bills are a pleasure to speak on because they deal with the operation of the government. Governments introduce pieces of legislation that make changes. As those changes are bedded in you quite often see small changes in the tax law as the community adjusts and as policy adjusts slightly. For example, you will see that shortly after a government provides funding after a natural disaster a TLAB come into the parliament to ensure that those act of grace payments are not taxed.

These bills are quite interesting and are usually filled with a range things that reflect the policy of the government over the previous years. The Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2015 Measures No. 4) Bill 2015—known as TSLAB4, a very sexy name—is a very good reflection of what this government is up to and what this government is not up to. I am going to talk though some elements of this bill while keeping that in mind. It is a very interesting reflection on this government. In many ways what is in this bill reflects the policy agenda of this government as a whole.

The bill has three schedules. Schedule 1 improves the integrity for the script for script rollover. This does not refer to a policy of the Liberal government but actually adjusts a policy introduced in the last years of the Labor government. It was a Labor government measure from the 2012-13 budget that made it harder for companies and trusts to avoid capital gains tax. The purpose of the script for script rollover, which is the policy from 2012-13, is to ensure that tax considerations are not an impediment to takeovers or merges involving companies or trusts. If shares or trust interests are exchanged for similar interests in another entity in a takeover or merger, the script for script rollover defers taxing a capital gain on the disposal of the script until the disposal of the replacement script. That is the kind of language you find in TSLABs.

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