Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

It is a relatively rare occurrence. It is relatively rare that senators actually come in, having listened to contributions, and respond from different perspectives and analyse the issues to some extent, rather than by way of a set piece contribution to the debate. To that extent, it was welcome. Senator Watson, in his contribution, at least conceded that the Labor policy, on his initial analysis, had some appeal and some attraction. Labor’s policy is to reduce the withholding tax treatment of 30 per cent down to 15 per cent to make Australia more attractive in terms of funds management. But Senator Watson went on to criticise Labor’s proposal and its policy, after being initially attracted to it. I am not quoting him here, but the basis of his argument was that there should be equitable tax treatment of the different forms of investment. If we were to adopt Senator Watson’s premise, we would not have the concessional tax treatment of superannuation, for example. If we were to adopt the logic of his argument against Labor’s proposal on the withholding tax, you would tax everything at the same rate with no concessionality at all. That is an interesting theory from Senator Watson, but in practice it would totally cut across the views on the tax concessional treatment of superannuation that he has so rightly expressed. So I would suggest that, whilst Senator Watson’s contribution in opposition to Labor’s proposal is an interesting economic theory, in reality and in practice tax concessional treatment is used in a whole range of areas in Australia to provide a range of incentives in public policy areas to address what are identified as weaknesses.

I thought the intervention from Senator Ronaldson was the more interesting—and indeed the less accurately analysed piece of disinformation, which is frankly how I would describe it. He referred to the specific example of Japan given by the Labor leader Mr Rudd. I will not say that he did this deliberately—far be it from me to allege that he deliberately misconstrued the example of Japan. The example of Japan was presented by Kevin Rudd in the context of Japan’s treatment of these sort of investments.