Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move Greens amendments (1) to (4) on sheet 5757, revised 2:

(1)    Clause 8, page 5 (line 11), after “(3),”, insert “(3A),”.

(2)    Clause 8, page 6 (after line 7), after subclause (3), insert:

Limit on other party

     (3A)    The annual salary of any officer of any other party to the arrangement is not greater than $1,000,000.

(3)    Clause 8, page 6 (after line 19), at the end of the clause, add:

        (7)    In this section:

officer has the same meaning as in the Corporations Act 2001.

salary includes any remuneration paid, promised or guaranteed in any form, including though consultancy agreements and grants of shares or other interests, and including any payment made upon resignation or retirement, however described.

(4)    Clause 10, page 7 (after line 8), after paragraph (1)(a), insert:

           (aa)    a provision that a member of ABIP Limited must not pay any officer an annual salary greater than $1,000,000.

We have been in discussion with the government over many weeks—and, indeed, effectively, beyond this bill, I have been moving in the Senate and in conversations variously with the Prime Minister and other ministers for some years—about the need to cap what the Prime Minister calls ‘obscene CEO payouts’. But the government seems completely transfixed with fear in taking on its public responsibility to ensure that if it cannot figure out how to put a cap on the multimillion-dollar, self-regulated payouts of CEOs of corporations that are not receiving so much direct public largesse as is embodied in this bill, at least it should do so for those corporations which are receiving that largesse.

The Prime Minister himself has referred to some of the multimillion-dollar, take-home pay packages of corporate executives in Australia as ‘obscene’. And on Lateline last night the Treasurer was referring to the banks—because of the Commonwealth Bank’s increase in interest rates without justification, and of course we know other banks are following suit—as ‘selfish’, but when pushed by Tony Jones was unable to name any action at all to protect the public interest here.

Where banks act in that way, the public pays for it—$18 a month for mortgage holders involved, for example, in the Commonwealth’s interest rate hike, which the Treasurer called ‘selfish’. And where you have CEOs on multimillion-dollar payouts, which the Prime Minister calls ‘obscene’, again, it is the public that pays for them. We might be dealing with the private sector here, but it is the punter, the battler, the mortgage payers, the interest payers—that is, the average Australian citizen—who is paying for these obscene CEO salaries. It is not as if they are coming out of some other bucket; the public pays for them through bank fees or through increased costs of the goods or services which the public purchases in the marketplace.

The Labor government is effectively saying, on the one hand, that it must not interfere in the marketplace; but, on the other hand, this very bill is centred on an intervention in the marketplace—not in the public interest, although I have no doubt that the government and the minister will twist it in that direction, but in the interest of the banks, particularly the big four banks, and the developers. This is effectively legislation to take $2 billion of public money, and potentially another $26 billion or $28 billion in guarantees, and place it at the disposal of the big banks for developers in Australia, for example, shopping centre or real estate developers, who have had foreign loans but may have difficulty getting the foreign lenders to continue those loans at expiry date.

So we have a situation where the government says, ‘There’s a financial crisis. We will deal with it by offering public money to these big corporations, but we seek nothing in return. We will do nothing about the ‘obscene payments’’, to quote the Prime Minister, or the ‘selfish behaviour’, to quote the Treasurer. They are saying, ‘We are a Labor government but we are in the thrall of these big corporations against the interests of the average Australian, including the much-vaunted and very real Australian working family.’ I don’t get it. Other countries have been able to move in this arena. President Obama has been able to put in a cap of half a million US dollars. There have been moves in Europe, for example in Germany, to legislate. They have all run into the massive power of the big corporate lobbyists, but the public interest is very real.

I have made it clear publicly that the Greens have put to the government an amendment which would effectively cap the salaries of the CEOs of the big four banks, and anybody who borrowed through this potentially $28 billion or $30 billion largesse of the public being facilitated through this legislation, at $1 million a year. Let me put that in perspective: that is three times the salary package of the Prime Minister of this country. There is no-one in this chamber, including the minister, who is going to get up and argue that the work of the Prime Minister is less than that of the CEO of any of these banks, let alone the CEOs of the development corporations who are going to be the recipients of the largesse of the public funding in this Ruddbank legislation.

The government have come back with some amendments, which the minister will no doubt talk about, which increase transparency and possibly enable shareholders in companies that are involved to look at the salary caps. In other words, it gives no facility that is not already available, effectively, or ought not be available in the transactions that the banks and the developers will be involved in. The public should know about them, and the shareholders, of course, ought to have a say. But we have asked that the shareholders of this money, held in guarantee by the government, have their rights looked after, and this government is manifestly failing. We appreciate that the government has, after quite strenuous lobbying by the Greens, put in place some extra measures. But it would not go where it should have gone. The Prime Minister of this country, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, has effectively backed down from his strong words about obscene payments and is failing the public interest by not using this opportunity to cap the CEOs’ salaries.

I wrote to the Treasurer in the last 48 hours and put to him that if we simply made the caps apply to the developers, not to the banks, that would be a huge concession in the government’s direction, and I would like to talk about that. I have had no request for further talks about that. The government is effectively saying, ‘We are not going to entertain any caps in this country of Australia. They can do it in other countries but not in this one.’ Not only is the free market a myth—because here we are making available billions of dollars of public money, which ought to be going to schools and hospitals, for big developers through this facility—but it is a myth that we will maintain where it is in the interests of the big corporations but, of course, not where it is in the interests of the wider public.

The move to find some common ground has not been met by the government. I have to say—and I am sure the minister will give a good account of this—there has been a change in the feeling of fear that foreign investment would not be available since this legislation was first mooted and brought before the House of Representatives. I detect that the urgency by the big corporations, their ardour to get their hands on the public billions to ensure their interests, has lessened somewhat, because there has been no round of defaults from foreign investors in terms of rolling over loans to Australian developers. So the urgency for this legislation is somewhat less than when it was first put forward. Ipso facto, the government’s ardour for passing this legislation is nowhere near as great. I can tell the Senate that if the situation arises where there is a default on a foreign loan to a work-rich enterprise in Australia which threatens the jobs of workers, we will look at that. But giving, through this legislation, a blank cheque—and with no further say by the parliament, I might add—through the banks to developers, with no quid pro quo and no restraint on these obscene multimillion-dollar payments, is something the Greens are not going to back off on. I told the government, in this committee, before the last parliamentary break that we wanted some action from the government on this or we would not be supporting this legislation. The test is now with the government. It should support these amendments. If not, the Greens will not be supporting the legislation.