Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendment be agreed to.

In relation to the cost recovery bills, the government supports the two opposition amendments to address recommendations made by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee in its report on the bills dated 20 June 2011. The first amendment, to review the supervisory cost recovery levy two years after royal assent of these bills, is in line with the Australian government's cost recovery guidelines and statements made within the cost recovery impact statement published by AUSTRAC in May 2011. The levy bill already provides for the minister to determine by legislative instrument the amount of levy payable by a leviable entity for a financial year. The use of a legislative instrument made by the minister ensures that cost recovery has the flexibility to be responsive to changes in the regulatory population and AUSTRAC's supervision strategy. It also provides an opportunity for annual consultation with industry as to the most appropriate allocation of costs across the sector. The amendment to mandate a review of the regulatory impact of the levy will complement the two annual periods of consultation with industry that will have occurred as a result of the ministerial determinations in the 2011-12 and 2012-13 financial years. These stakeholder consultations, together with any changes made to the cost recovery model, will provide valuable input into the review of the supervisory cost recovery levy provisions contained within the bills.

The second amendment delays comm­encement of the late penalty payment provision for six months after the commencement of the operative parts of the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre Supervisory Cost Recovery Levy Bill 2011. The government has already publicly stated that invoices in respect of the AUSTRAC supervisory levy for the 2011-12 financial year would not be issued until at least February of next year. This time frame will provide AUSTRAC with an appropriate amount of time to establish its systems to collect the levy and also to engage with industry on practical aspects of its application. As such, the government supports this amendment, which clarifies in the bill statements already made on this issue.

The suite of bills before the House today are a positive step for Australia's anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing regulator. AUSTRAC's superv­isory work goes towards protecting the integrity of the financial system and helping businesses remain resilient to money laundering. I commend the amendment to the House.

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased that the government did accept some of the opposition amendments, which improved the recovery of this bill. The opposition remains very ambivalent about this bill as a whole. Essentially we are adding a new layer of bureaucracy on business. It is an important layer of bureaucracy—I am not saying that we should not do it—but we are asking them to conform to this new bureaucracy and then coming to them and saying, 'You must also pay the bills for it.' I think that when you are providing a service directly to business that they require then it of course makes a lot of sense to recoup the cost to the taxpayer. But when you are asking business to just bear a bureaucratic burden on behalf of society—in this case, to combat the financing of terrorism and other illegal activities—then I think it begs the question about whether it is appropriate to get business to pay the bill for that. So we remain ambivalent about this bill, although we do believe that the acceptance of these two amendments makes it better than it was. In particular, the late payment amendment is due to start on 1 July, within a week, and it would have been quite insulting, I think, to run around and charge people late fees when the parliament is only just dealing with this about a week before the bill is supposed to commence. With these comments, the opposition does support the passage of the amended bill.

Question agreed to.