Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Republic) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] The two industries that the Morrison government has really left behind when it comes to support during this COVID pandemic have been the Australian university sector and our arts and cultural institutions. The latter, of course, is a very important part of Australian society. It is the one that tells the stories of our culture, our history and who we are as Australian people.

In the electorate that I represent, there are many who are very proud to work in Australia's artistic and cultural industries and who are very disappointed by the lack of support that they've received from the Morrison government during this pandemic. Many of them have had their productions cut. Many of them have lost their incomes and their jobs, and are struggling to support their families. And many of them work in the Australian screen industry. This bill goes to changing some of the taxation arrangements for the screen industry in Australia but falls well short of the support that the industry deserves if we're going to have a thriving Australian screen industry, both movies and television, that promotes Australia's artistic achievements, culture, history and heritage.

This is an industry that's undergoing rapid transformation, and that transformation is making it much more competitive and difficult for Australian stories and Australian voices to be heard. We all know about the increase in streaming services that people throughout the world and Australians are tuning into for their entertainment. The majority of that content is coming out of the United States or other big nations like Great Britain, and that means the opportunities for Australian voices and Australian stories to be heard are diminishing. There's been a complete lack of support from the Morrison government to cater for that transformation and to ensure that the necessary support and assistance is there for the Australian screen industry to continue to tell Australian stories and ensure that Australian voices are heard. I've got four kids at home. I don't want them to grow up developing American accents because all they've been given access to through modern-day television and streaming services is American content. But that's the way it's becoming in the living rooms of Australia.

The opportunities for Australian content through streaming services are diminishing. Many of those companies that produce the content we've traditionally seen on Australian TVs are finding it difficult to compete on a mass scale with the larger producers coming out of the United States, and are receiving no support from the Morrison government to continue to tell their stories. While this amendment to our taxation laws does deal with some of those issues, it simply doesn't go far enough and give the industry the support that it deserves. Typical of this government and their approach to screen policy, they've had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards doing something that is positive for the Australian film and television industry. But they've attached many things to this bill that are a negative for the rest of the industry.

We all know that the industry has been campaigning for some time to stop the Morrison government reducing the producer offset. They've been somewhat successful in that campaign. I want to congratulate the industry for not only coming to Canberra earlier in the year but also their concerted campaign to make sure that Australian producers get the support that they deserve to ensure that we have a viable film industry here in Australia. They've been successful in ensuring that that reduction in the producer offset for the Australian film sector, from 40 to 30 per cent, was abandoned. If the Morrison government had bothered to consult the sector in the first place, they would have realised that that proposal was a bad idea. While that's now been dropped, the government continues with other damaging measures.

The increase in the qualifying expenditure threshold for the producer offset is bad news for many smaller and lower-budget films. This means that many of those smaller producers, directors and, indeed, actors who have produced great Australian content and breakthrough films in the past may not be able to under this new regime. The change in the qualification for the offset not only affects production but also affects post-production, because the qualification for that offset to kick in has also been doubled, from $500,000 to $1 million. That means that people who work in post-production will possibly have their careers and their jobs affected by this because they won't qualify for the tax offset in the future, because they don't meet that threshold.

As I mentioned earlier, it's not the bigger production houses that need support from the government; it's the smaller ones. But this particular change to our laws and the change that the government is enshrining in this bill make it more difficult for those smaller producers to get a start, to get a leg-up and to get their big break in the industry. These are the kinds of productions that we want to encourage, to help tell more Australian stories.

Another important part of this bill is the removal of the Gallipoli clause. This clause got its name from the great Australian movie, Gallipoli, because it's the best example of an Australian story which couldn't avoid filming parts of its production overseas. This clause existed so that Australian movies that needed to do some filming overseas could still claim the expenditure against the offset and not be disadvantaged. The removal of this simply makes it harder for Australian stories to be told. The Morrison government hasn't provided any clear rationale for why this change is necessary or for the damage that it will do to the sector. It's a clear cost-saving exercise. It's an austerity measure during a pandemic, when the arts and film industry is on its knees, and it doesn't make sense. It comes at a time when the domestic screen sector is struggling to get traction during the pandemic.

As I mentioned earlier, this isn't a government that's committed to supporting our television and film industry and our arts sector more broadly. I have a couple of independent cinema outlets in the electorate that I represent. The member for Watson and I, late last year, had a meeting with those independent cinemas. They told us about the struggle that they had had over the last 12 months of the pandemic and about the struggle just to get content for them to show to encourage people to come back to the movies. Reforms like this will make it much more difficult for that Australian content to be produced and are a regressive step during a pandemic, when we should be doing all we can to encourage our artistic industries.

The other element of this bill relates to corporate insolvency. Schedule 2 of the bill makes a number of transitional and consequential amendments relating to the government's 2020 reforms for corporate insolvency. Labor is not opposing these reforms. The reforms introduce a new streamlined approach to debt reduction for small businesses and introduce a simplified liquidation pathway for small businesses. We had significant concerns about the rushed nature of these reforms when they passed in 2020. In particular, we were concerned about the reforms that allow easier phoenixing of companies or that allow failing companies to avoid paying employee entitlements. That's why Labor moved an amendment to impose a statutory review on the bill, but that wasn't adopted by parliament.

The legislative changes in this bill make a number of small consequential amendments to ensure that the reforms that passed in December last year operate as intended. Those reforms include ensuring employees can access the Fair Entitlements Guarantee where a firm is wound up following a restructuring process, ensuring prudentially regulated firms can't use the restructuring process, making changes to ensure the process applies appropriately to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations, and placing protections relating to restructuring practitioners in the primary legislation rather than in the regulations. These are all sensible reforms that will ensure that the bill operates as intended.

But as I mentioned earlier, the government hasn't gone far enough when it comes to ensuring that it is cracking down on phoenixing. It's a terrible indictment on a number of industries in Australia that we still have people who put businesses into liquidation, who owe creditors and who then go and set up under another name with another company and continue to operate, and leave many, including employees, in the lurch. This government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make changes to our corporations laws to ensure that they are fairer so that we are reducing the impact of phoenixing and people avoiding their obligations to creditors, most notably employees. These reforms don't go far enough, and there is more that the government could do. They could start by adopting some of the reforms that Labor took to the last election.

See this speech in context