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

I start by thanking all the honourable members for their contribution and participation in the debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Responsible Buy Now Pay Later and Other Measures) Bill 2024 and the Capital Works (Build to Rent Misuse Tax) Bill 2024. I note the contribution made by the honourable member from Nicholls, who preceded me. He made the point that has been made many times in this House over the 15 years that I've been here—about the same time as you, Deputy Speaker Wilkie—that, with omnibus bills like these, you'll find stuff in there that you like and stuff in there that you don't. If we debated them all separately, we'd be spending more than 365 days a year in parliament. I'm sure the member for Nicholls is as keen as I am to get back to his electorate and deal with the other stuff that is pressing upon members of this place. We try to deal with debates in the House efficiently by putting all of the Treasury portfolio measures within the same bills. There is nothing novel about this approach.

The bills before the House deal with, as the titles suggest, regulation of buy-now pay-later, an important piece of credit market reform. It follows on from other work that we've done in the two short years that we've been in government in regulating credit markets—small-amount credit contracts and consumer leases. We introduced a raft of reforms late last year to lift the bar and regulate those credit markets. Buy-now pay-later is an outlier. If anybody walked into a shop, they would see, at most retail outlets, that you can pay by Mastercard, you can pay by Visa and you can pay by Afterpay or Zip. The simple fact of the matter is they all operate like credit but are not currently regulated in the same way.

The objective of these bills is to ensure that there is a base of regulation that treats them all as consumer credit and regulates them all under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act. We're not trying to drive square pegs into round holes. There are differences and variations in some of these products. The small-amount credits, which are available under these products, are regulated slightly differently, but the overall obligations are similar. Scaling to risk is the essence of this, ensuring that we are imposing greater obligations for greater risk and greater potential harm.

Although I'm enjoying the fact that the majority of members who have participated in this debate support these reforms, some are overreaching in suggesting that their side of politics was either interested or did some stuff in this area, when the simple fact of the matter is that it wasn't until this government brought these matters before the House that any action was seen on them. There have been some contributions, although minor, around the tax transparency stuff, which my colleague the assistant minister for the Treasury, Andrew Leigh, has been working on and which uplifts and puts Australia, if not at the top, near the top of the world in the area of requiring multinational corporations which operate in Australia and elsewhere to provide country-by-country tax transparency reporting. It matters for a whole bunch of reasons—not least of which is other areas of government decision-making.

I want to stress, as I have had representations from some other countries, that what we're attempting to do here is not single out a country but definitely single out the behaviours of certain companies who may not be doing the right thing by this jurisdiction. That is our concern—to ensure that people are paying the correct and fair share of tax in our jurisdiction. I'm pleased to see that, eventually, the coalition have come onboard with the instant asset write-off. Not before time, this week we have seen the measures that were introduced in the budget before last pass through the Senate. That delay created enormous uncertainty for small businesses, who have perhaps delayed making purchases because they were uncertain about whether there would be access to this $20,000 instant asset write-off. It is good news for them that there is now certainty in relation to the 2023-24 tax year, but this measure extends those provisions to the 2024-25 tax year. I just say to those on the other side of the chamber: can we get behind this? You say you're for small business. Can we provide them with some certainty by ensuring this has swift passage through the other place?

Finally, a lot of heat and words have been exchanged over the build-to-rent measures. I note that once again the member for Griffith is encouraging this chamber to entertain unconstitutional measures by requiring the Commonwealth government to introduce rent freezes. He knows full well—or he should by now; he has been banging on about this for two years—that we can't do that. It's good for TikTok, but it's not good for the credibility of this place for us to be calling for these things. The simple fact is that we need a lot of measures to deal with the housing issues. I don't pretend for one moment that the build-to-rent measures that we've included within this bill are the solution overall to all of the housing pressures. But proving up an asset class and ensuring that there is more rental accommodation in our cities, which are short on all forms of accommodation, including rental accommodation, is a part of the solution, and that's why we put it forward in this bill.

With all of those comments made, I thank the members once again for the lively debate around this bill. We won't be supporting either the second reading amendment or the foreshadowed substantive amendments. We commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context