Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not going to comment on the Tax Laws Amendment (2006 Measures No. 4) Bill 2006, except for schedule 4, which I have some serious problems with. Schedule 4 is about discriminating against the Australian investor in favour of the overseas investor. Schedule 4 talks about the so-called capital-gains-tax-free world of people living overseas, which Australians do not get.

This bill is going to go through because the Labor Party support it. It is interesting that today, when we heard about Mr Rudd’s ‘fork in the road’, the first thing he will do at his fork in the road is look after people overseas at the expense of Australian investors. Apparently this fork in the road is going to be nothing more than some sort of slovenly roadside diner at which all that is dolloped out is disappointment to Australians.

It is quite clear that not only are we are about to pass a piece of legislation that discriminates against Australians but we are doing it at the behest of other people in other corners of the globe. We are here to look after other people in other corners of the globe before we start looking after our own! Some of the figures that have been put up—I have been reading through the explanatory memorandum—indicate that it is going to cost the Australian economy $50 million in 2006-07, $85 million in 2007-08, $80 million in the following year and $75 million after that.

I will give you a bit of a run-down on some of the things that are happening. We have this takeover of Coles. The bid was for $18 billion but let us call it a $16 billion takeover. Let us say they get a 20 per cent write-up on that $16 billion takeover. That is $3.2 billion. We are going to compromise $960 million of our own money in that one transaction.

The Labor Party support this and it is complete lunacy. The Coles workers go to public hospitals, send their kids to public schools and go on public roads. They are supported by a defence force and a police force. All these things are supported by the Australian taxpayer, yet the benefits of that transaction go to the United States treasury. So what are the Labor Party going to do? Are they going to send Kevin Rudd over there to knock on the door to ask for some of the money back?

Then we have Boral and Qantas which are up for takeover. How on earth did the Labor Party decide that they were going to agree with these figures? It is a peculiar day when the first thing we do at the fork in the road is follow someone else. The first thing the Labor Party have done, at the fork in the road, is to follow someone else. The Labor Party’s clear statement to the people of Parramatta and Ipswich today is that they are trying to find mates. That is what they are doing; they are trying to find mates. This is a piece of legislation to try and find mates. That is disappointing, because they had a chance to make a difference.

This legislation is going to be sneaked through. I agree with what Senator Murray said: it has not had the proper airing in the public realm that it should have had. I strongly question the numbers that have been put up. Do you know that today we have overseas equity firms that in the United States have put in a bid for Home Depot of $100 billion? They have the ability to remove $100 billion from the share market and the Labor Party is quite happy for that investment to be tax free. They are quite happy to completely desert the working class.

I will tell you what happens when these overseas equity funds buy up an Australian company—and this might be news to the Labor Party—they break them up, because they have to try to take cost-cutting measures. So the Labor Party are turbocharging the break-up of Australian companies with the loss of Australian jobs. That is what they are doing today. And then they wonder why people do not take the Labor Party seriously at their IR rallies. It is because people know that the Labor Party are not fair dinkum. They know the Labor Party are not the full bottle. Today the Labor Party are going to turbocharge the break-up of Australian companies, with the loss of Australian jobs. They have some pathetic excuse as to why they believe this is a good thing. I do not know whether this will get reported, but I hope that Labor Party constituents find out about this. I hope they bring the Labor Party to account on why they would discriminate against Australian companies, why they would exacerbate the break-up of Australian companies and why they would move Australian jobs overseas.

Why would the Labor Party, who want to get into power, do that? What is their excuse? Maybe the Kevin and Julia roadshow is getting out of here quickly so that they do not have to explain that to the Australian people. It is interesting that the first thing Mr Rudd will have to talk about at his so-called fork in the road roadside diner, the slovenly house of rhetoric, is his views about delivering this to the Australian people. Boral, at $4 billion, will be up for grabs, as will Coles. Even, I think, the market cap of BHP Billiton, our biggest company, is $164 billion. So if they can find $100 billion for a department store in the United States, I reckon they could start looking out for large sections of the Australian economy. What you are doing today is turbocharging that.

With regard to schedule 4, I will support Senator Murray in opposing that schedule. This is an issue we have brought up before. We have been trying to lobby support and get it out there in the public domain. It has been very hard to get some support, but I hope that the fourth estate is still vigilant enough to start running this scenario past people. On the argument that accountants support it: I can tell you right now that I am an accountant and I do not support it, and every other accountant I run it past cannot believe it; it just fascinates them.

Here is another bit of information: they say it is all about reciprocal agreements. I can affirm that when $1 billion is up for grabs, people might start using other tax-free companies to base their rating on. I will give you one place. It is not very far away and people might have heard of it: New Zealand. New Zealand has no capital gains tax, so you can launch from New Zealand, come into Australia, buy up Coles, hold it for a year, sell Coles, put your money in your pocket, take it back to New Zealand and not pay one cent of tax—and that is something you are agreeing to today.

Of course, you have the Bahamas, Lichtenstein and the Cayman Islands—all these are going to be assisted greatly. One would presume that Australia had a problem attracting foreign investment. I think the problem is that at times we might be attracting a bit too much of it. But there is no problem in attracting foreign investment to Australia. It is falling over itself to get in here. We have a safe, stable country; that is why they are coming here. What they are going to have now is a benefit that no-one in this chamber has, no-one in Ipswich, Queensland has, no-one in Mackay will have, no-one in Parramatta will have and that no-one in the suburbs of Perth will have. What people overseas will have is the benefit that it will now be tax free.

So if I am a reliable investor looking for a break and I know that the people of Pyongyang have a better tax advantage than the people of Sydney or that the people of Houston, Texas have a better tax advantage than the people of Sydney, the smartest thing for me to do is to move, to leave Australia and go somewhere else and invest in this country. I just cannot work out why you want to support that. I cannot work out how you could possibly think that this could go through to the keeper without someone finding out about it. Where was the glorious speech by one of our learned friends on the other side of the chamber as to why it is a great deal for the Australian voter to pay a tax they would not have to pay in an Australian company if they lived overseas? The only exemption is if you could say: ‘If the company’s more than 50 per cent real property, they’re outside the law.’ There is a fair bit of investment you can do that you can box up so that 49 per cent of your company is mining shares or 49 per cent of your company is land and 51 per cent is something else.

The vast majority of our investments, however, show that there are inactions and goodwill. If you live overseas but not in Australia, investment will be tax free. I think that it will be an interesting debate, and I challenge Mr Rudd in his new role as the glorious Leader of the Opposition to explain to the Australian people why he believes that one of his first decisions is going to be this—this is the fork in the road he has decided to follow.