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

Something extraordinary has happened this week. For the third time in three days, an identical proposition has travelled from the Senate to this House and sought our agreement. That proposition is that we remove a discrimination which currently exists within our corporate law, which enables some of Australia's largest companies to avoid the sorts of scrutiny and transparency that apply to every other like company in the country. It's not right, it's not fair and it's not in the public interest, and this House should agree with the amendments that have been moved and agreed to in the Senate to the Treasury Laws Amendment (2020 Measures No. 2) Bill 2020.

It is worth noting that we have now approached the 25th year of the existence of a measure which was supposed to be both temporary and transitional—the 25th year. And as the member for Fenner said in his contribution yesterday, a measure that was once supposed to be a grandfathering provision is now a great-great-great-great grandfathering provision!

It is about time that this government and this House agree to a proposition which was recommended to the government five years ago to be incorporated into our law. When it made that recommendation, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission said this:

The lack of availability of public financial reports reduces transparency about possible indicators of tax avoidance or tax minimisation.

There can be no clearer example of clear advice to government and the inability or the unwillingness of government to accede to that advice.

If the majority of members of this place were to be coupled with the majority of members of the other place, I have no doubt that this proposition would be moved into law. If you are going to adopt a proposition which, on its face, is completely opposite to the public interest and if you are going to adopt a proposition which is completely opposite to that which has been recommended to you by the corporate regulator and if you are going to refuse to accept the recommendation from a Senate committee that has spent several years investigating the matter, the very least you could do would be to come into this place and explain why.

Yesterday, we gave the assistant minister at the table the opportunity to explain why his government was refusing to accept this proposition. The day before, we gave the assistant minister the opportunity to come here and explain why they refused to accept this proposition. On the first time it appeared before this House, the assistant minister refused to speak but tabled a document. The document had this to say:

The House will not pre-empt the Government's response to this recommendation as part of its response to the Senate Economics Committee's corporate tax avoidance reports.

That report is five years old. We've had three elections, three Treasurers and three Prime Ministers since that report was given to the government. We are still waiting. Glaciers move faster than this government on adopting a report from that Senate committee—a report which adopts the recommendation of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Many members opposite may not be aware of what they're going to be coming into this chamber to vote on. They are about to refuse a proposition that says that we should not have laws which discriminate against one group of companies and another group of companies dependent on the date they are incorporated. They are going to vote to maintain a proposition to level the playing field between one group of companies and another group of companies. And you may ask: why does this matter? Transparency always matters in corporate affairs. It matters to creditors, it matters to investors and it should matter to the members of the company, but it also matters to taxpayers. At a time when this government has managed to more than double the debt that they have inherited—debt this week clicked over at $673 billion—it's incumbent upon them to ensure that every corporate pays every cent of tax that they are required to pay.

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