Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

With this Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 1) Bill, the Liberals, under Scott Morrison, are attacking the rights of every shareholder in Australia, and they're doing it all because of an infinitesimally small number of class actions. The Treasurer actually says, in his own explanatory memorandum, that the main impact of these changes will be to reduce the amount of time that companies and company officers must spend on ensuring that they have complied with their obligations to provide accurate and timely information to shareholders. Heaven forbid that company officers spend time on ensuring that they are making timely and accurate disclosures to shareholders!

This bill is bad news for Australian shareholders and it is bad news for the Australian economy. Mum-and-dad investors, self-funded retirees and other individuals across Australia make life-changing investment decisions on the basis of what they are told by companies and by company directors. Australian investors know that they can generally rely on what they are told because the laws introduced by the Howard government impose strict disclosure requirements on companies and company directors. Not anymore, if the Morrison government gets its way. The changes proposed by the Morrison government would put the narrow self-interest of a tiny number of individual company directors above the interests of millions of mum-and-dad investors and self-funded retirees and of large institutional investors.

According to a survey conducted by major commercial law firm King & Wood Mallesons, these changes do not even appear to be supported by a majority of senior company directors. The Mallesons survey asked 195 company directors and senior executives about the Morrison government's temporary changes to continuous disclosure laws. Only 11.3 per cent said that they relied upon those changes, and almost 80 per cent said that the changes should not be made permanent.

Why would the vast majority of company directors and senior executives oppose the Morrison government's attempt to make it easier for people like them to mislead or withhold important information from shareholders? My theory is that it's because most company directors understand that Australia's strict continuous disclosure laws are ultimately good for everyone. They make Australian companies more attractive to investors, including international investors, and so make it easier for Australian companies to attract capital. In other words, Australia's strict continuous disclosure laws make it easier for company directors to do the job that they are there to do, and that is to promote the interests of shareholders. I also think that most company directors in Australia do the right thing and have no problem with laws that require them to do no more than the right thing, and that is to provide shareholders with timely and accurate information about the company they've invested their money in.

It must come as a shock to the Morrison government to learn that there are people out there in the Australian community who are happy to do the right thing and who actually have no problem with laws that keep them accountable! This is a foreign idea to the Morrison government, which is a government at war with transparency and any notion of accountability.

When the Auditor-General discovered that the Morrison government had used $100 million of taxpayers' money as a Liberal Party slush fund, in the so-called sports rorts affair, and revealed that the government had paid Liberal donors in Western Sydney $30 million for a $3 million block of land, the Prime Minister did not apologise. No minister took responsibility. No minister was reprimanded or sacked. Instead, it was the Auditor-General who was punished, with a cut to his budget, because it's never the wrongdoer who is punished or held accountable by the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has made it clear that ministers in his government can get away with pretty much anything. They can rort grant programs, use forged documents and even call a young woman who alleges that she was raped—

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