Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party, Minister for Revenue and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will be very pleased to respond to the member for Fenner. I think he has truly missed his calling. He had a calling for the stage, and I am so sorry that more people could not see the performance we had here today. The member has asked a number of questions. I will specifically refer to the ABS question first. The member asked, 'Have there been cuts to the ABS?' He is absolutely right to say that there have been. Under the previous government, of which he was a member, there were very, very significant cuts to the Australia Bureau of Statistics—$44 million worth. So much so, there was very significant criticism that, because of the cuts made by Labor, the statistical data that the ABS was putting out could not be relied upon—in particular, the labour force figures, which are so fundamental to our economic understanding in this country.

I can say very proudly that, as a member of this government and as parliamentary secretary at the time, I was able to announce, with the Treasurer, that we were providing the Australian Bureau of Statistics with an investment of $257 million. That is right: we put $257 million into the Australian Bureau of Statistics to make sure that it could do its job after the cuts that were made by the previous Labor government. I think the member for Fenner is in somewhat of a glass house when he asks about cuts to the ABS. If the member would like to ask some more questions about the ABS, I am sure my colleague will be more than happy to expand in a bit more detail.

I am also very keen to touch on a couple of the other elements of his question. He asked about housing affordability and why it is that the government does not support Labor's negative gearing proposal. I remind the member for Fenner that he has said a few things about this himself. The member for Fenner worried that negative gearing changes, such as those proposed by his own party, would have an impact on investment properties that people thought they could rely on. That is something that he said on 21 May 2013. I know he is very flexible in his approach to policy, but I do feel that he ought to be reminded of the statements that he has made. Of course we all know that Labor's negative gearing policy would be very detrimental to those people who have made investments in property and would, in fact, hit people on very average incomes while advantaging those people who have very high other investment incomes, because under Labor's plan they would still be able to negatively gear—they would not be penalised in any way whatsoever.

This brings me to my final point in the time that I have remaining—multinational tax avoidance. It is an issue that is very dear to the government because we know it is important. It is absolutely important to have integrity in our taxation system. It is not enough to simply talk about it and to pretend that you care about it. You actually have to do something about it. You actually need to take action on it. Our government has done that through passing the Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law. There was no help from Labor in getting this passed—no help at all. When the vote came in the House, was the member for Fenner voting with the government or was he voting against the government? He was voting against passing the government's changes that gave the Australian Taxation Office increased powers to raise penalties and raise assessments against those people who are doing the wrong thing by the Australia taxpayer.

We have taken action here. We have also increased the resources in the Australian Taxation Office's international division. It is much larger than it was under the Labor Party because we know that, if you are going to increase and strengthen the powers of the Australian Taxation Office, you need to also strengthen the enforcement capability. It is quite logical. That is why we have taken the approach that we have.

We also established the Tax Avoidance Taskforce in this year's budget. I would have thought that the member opposite would have read about this in the budget papers. We are providing more than $667 million to establish the Tax Avoidance Taskforce, which will bring in over the forward estimates period around $3.7 billion from those people who ought to be paying tax in Australia. On behalf of the rest of Australian taxpayers the Australian government will make sure that they do.

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