Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

This law and these changes were designed to deal precisely with multinational companies shifting profits around the world and avoiding tax. It was part of an OECD and G20 combined effort to address this type of multinational tax avoidance. These big multinational companies have access, as I said earlier today, to mechanisms and arrangements that are not available to Australian taxpayers, to ordinary Australian businesses.

What this law provides is that businesses with a turnover of over $1 billion have to report how much tax they pay in every jurisdiction so that everybody will know how much they are paying. And when we look, under the new law, as to whether an arrangement is designed to avoid tax, instead of the old provision—which had been, obviously, the law of the land under the Labor government and previous governments—the purpose being that it had to have a sole or dominant test of tax avoidance, the new test is that tax avoidance is 'one of the principal purposes'. That makes it much, much more straightforward for the ATO to levy tax. The level of penalties has been doubled. The jurisdictions to which the laws used to apply were basically limited to no-tax or very-low-tax tax havens. Now, that restriction is no longer there.

So what the law did was give the Australian Taxation Office the 21st century tools to combat ingenious 21st century tax avoidance to collect that money. That is what the law did, and the Labor Party voted against it. They voted against it. They lined up with the multinational tax dodgers. They stood in the way of the ATO collecting the money we need for schools, for hospitals and for roads. They have no shame. They have lined up with the tax dodgers.

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