Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Gilmore for her question. When it comes to ensuring multinationals pay all the tax that they should be paying in Australia, you have got to use every single lever that you have available to you. Every single opportunity that the government has to ensure that multinationals pay their fair share of tax in this country has to be deployed. That is why, today, I have put in place a new condition that will be placed on all foreign investment approvals in this country that they must pay their tax here on what they earn in Australia. That requires compliance with Australian law and it requires compliance with Australian tax office directions to provide information in relation to their investment and to advise the ATO if investors enter into any transactions with nonresidents to which transfer pricing or anti-avoidance measures of Australian tax law may potentially apply.

Amongst many of these new controls, there is also that additional conditions may also be applied where a significant tax risk is identified in a particular case. These may include requiring the investor to enter into advance pricing arrangements with or to seek rulings from the ATO or comply with other directions that the ATO may apply to their specific circumstances. If the investor who would have been given a foreign investment approval fails to meet those conditions, they will be faced with divestment of that investment.

This is a serious lever that this government has chosen to apply in these cases. It was not one that those opposite used to apply. In the six years they had to address multinational tax avoidance, what did they do?

They did nothing. When this government put multinational anti-avoidance laws into this parliament, what did those opposite do? They all voted against it. Every single one of them voted against laws that would ensure multinationals would pay their fair share of tax in this country. Digital services legislation which we have brought into this parliament will also ensure that multinationals pay their fair share of tax at the point of sale, and of course there are the low-value threshold changes that we will also be bringing forward. When it comes to ensuring that multinationals pay their fair share of tax, whether it is with the legislation we have introduced or whether it is the foreign investment approvals that we provide, we will ensure that the conditions are there to ensure that they pay that tax.

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