Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) recognises the importance of cash for conducting transactions around Australia; and

(2) notes the concerns that have arisen in some parts of the community about the bill, in the context of the stagnating Australian economy under the Coalition Government".

This bill, the Currency (Restrictions on the Use of Cash) Bill 2019, establishes a cash payment limit and introduces offences for entities that make or accept cash payments of $10,000 or more from 1 January 2020. Offences under the new provision would carry a maximum penalty of $25,000, or two years imprisonment, for individuals or businesses which recklessly break the cash limit. These offences can apply whether the individual is a recipient of or a payee of the cash value. The bill follows on from the 2018 report of the government's Black Economy Taskforce, which found that large cash payments can be anonymous and untraceable, allowing businesses to underreport their income and to offer consumers discounts for transactions that reflect the business' avoided obligation. It has also found that the cash economy is a vehicle for money laundering.

The bill does include the power to make exceptions to the cash payment limit, through a legislative instrument made by the relevant minister. I understand that the government's draft rules—which are not a part of the bill—would exempt the following types of payments. Firstly, payments related to personal or private transactions—for example, purchasing a motor vehicle off somebody in your neighbourhood. Secondly, payments that must be reported by an entity under the anti-money laundering and counterterrorism legislation, provided that, broadly, the entity with a reporting obligation complies with their obligation under that legislation. The third exemption under the draft rules would apply to payments made or accepted by a public official, in which the public official is legally required to make or accept a cash payment in the course of their duties. The fourth exemption would apply to payments that only exceed the cash payment limit because the payment is part of a transaction involving collecting, holding or delivering cash that is undertaken in the course of an enterprise of collecting or delivering cash. That seems to be an obvious one, as well. The fifth exemption would be payments that only exceed the cash payment limit because the payment is or includes an amount of digital currency. The draft rules also provide to exempt payments that occur in situations where no alternative method of payment could be reasonably used, although I do make the point that it is unclear whether this would apply as an exemption or a defence to an offence arising under the legislation, a matter that requires further interrogation. Future rules could exempt other types of payments or be changed to remove exemptions for types of payments.

There has been a lot of concern within the community about the impact of this bill. There wouldn't be a member in this House who hasn't received representations from constituents in relation to it. To facilitate the orderly interrogation of those concerns and the swift passage of this bill to the Senate, where it may be further interrogated and investigated, Labor won't be opposing the bill in the House. But we have been working with the crossbenches to ensure that there is a rigorous examination of the provisions of the bill in the Senate in order to ensure that all of the community concerns that have been raised with Labor, and presumably with the crossbenches as well, are thoroughly ventilated, investigated and dealt with. It is a significant provision, with significant penalties, and we want to ensure that there are no unintended consequences and that those community concerns can be dealt with.

While the tap-and-go phenomenon—which, I must confess, I've adopted—is an amazing convenience, we do recognise that cash remains a favoured medium of transaction for many law-abiding members of the Australian community. Those in small business, pensioners and retirees and members of Australia's diverse multicultural communities have an attachment to cash and to using cash for their everyday transactions. Older Australians use cash for more than half of their payments. Australians in the lowest income quartile use cash for more than 40 per cent of all of their payments. We recognise their concerns, and the concerns of the communities, as being worthy of further consideration. This is why we have worked with the crossbench on ensuring that we can investigate, and hopefully allay, the concerns that have been raised.

It is important to understand why Australians have these concerns with the government's proposed cash-transaction ban, and it's why I've moved an amendment at the second reading stage of the bill's consideration. The truth of the matter is that Australians have no faith in this government's capacity to manage the economic problems that the country is facing right now, and they certainly have no faith in the government's ability to manage those problems in the interests of ordinary everyday Australians. The Morrison government quite simply has a plan for a slogan—it's got a political plan—but, to coin a phrase, as to an economic plan, 'Where the bloody hell are you?' They've no plan for the country when it comes to managing economic growth or managing the parlous state of wage increases. Of economic growth, we have the lowest rate since the global financial crisis. The economy is struggling. The government loves to blame every problem on somebody else. Whether it's economic headwinds or Labor, somebody else is always at fault; somebody else is always the cause of the problem; it's not the parlous state of their own economic management.

Our economy is struggling, but the New Zealand economy, just across the ditch, is growing at nearly twice the pace of ours. No Australian ever likes to be beaten by a Kiwi in anything, and, while the Kiwis have raced ahead, Australian household living standards have declined under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison disaster show. Real household median income is lower now than it was in 2013. Wages are growing at the lowest rate since record keeping began. We've got 1.9 million Australians who are either looking for work, or looking for more work because they are underemployed. Business investment is down 20 per cent from when the Liberals came to office, and it is now at its lowest level since the 1990s recession. Consumer confidence and consumption growth are incredibly weak. Weak growth like this is the inevitable result of a government with a political strategy but no economic plan. And what's the government's answer to the challenges which the Australian economy is facing? Quite simply, it's silence. They've no plan to get business investment moving. They've no plan to deal with the deepening drought. In fact, we've seen the National Party backroom revolt going on—entirely politically motivated. They're more concerned about their own political futures than they are about the future of drought-riven communities and more concerned about who takes credit for the woeful policies than about what's going on in those communities that they represent. They've no plan to deal with this at all. There's a lot of noise, but no plan. Instead, the coalition has one answer and one answer only, and that is to continue with their current strategy—which is doing nothing, which means flat growth, flat wages and a decline in confidence.

It is no wonder that members of the public are rightfully concerned when they see legislation such as this. They are saying: 'What is the real agenda here? What's going on? Why is the government introducing this bill when they haven't dealt with any of these other issues which are affecting wellbeing at the household level?'

I want to say another thing about the government's management of not only the economy but also the business before this House. As I said at the outset, this bill was in part a response to a recommendation of the Black Economy Taskforce about restricting the use of cash which would then lead to tax avoidance or to money-laundering activities. If only the government were so active in introducing and paying attention to all of the recommendations of the Black Economy Taskforce, because a very important recommendation of the Black Economy Taskforce was on dealing with anti-phoenixing activity. Phoenixing activity is where a business or a set of directors deliberately send a business into liquidation, strip or transfer the assets from that business to another business and leave the creditors stranded, whether they're tradies or small businesses—

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