Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As Deputy Chair and on behalf of the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, I present the report of the committee on the Preventing the Misuse of Government Advertising Bill 2010, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I would like to commence my comments on this by thanking the secretariat of the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, who laboured under a particularly heavy workload over the last week. This bill, as the Senate knows, was referred to us late last week and required work at odd hours and over the weekend in conjunction with other references. So I would like, on behalf of the entire committee, to recognise and thank them for that work.

The tight time frame for this bill under consideration meant that we did not have the time to receive the normal number of submissions—it was less than a handful—and I will not take too much of the Senate’s time today in outlining the details of coalition senators’ views other than to highlight the concern that we have with the potential for this bill to compromise the independence of the Auditor-General. The Auditor-General has a time-honoured and very important role in overseeing the management and financial performance of Commonwealth entities, and the potential for this bill to interfere with that is a particular risk that has not convinced coalition senators of its merits.

This bill has arisen in the last few days partly because of the outrageous and unprecedented hypocrisy of the ALP with respect to government advertising—particularly with regard to the Senate itself when the government specifically held over release of documentation regarding the latest government advertising campaign on mining until the morning after Senate estimates had concluded. Specifically, the day after the committee had rescheduled its hearings to allow consideration of government advertising to accommodate the minister on the Thursday morning, it was still then held over to be released on Friday morning.

I would like to highlight and express my own personal concerns with some of the comments made in the part of the report submitted by the Greens and Senator Bob Brown. Senator Brown highlights a concern not directly related to this bill, but that is an issue that has been raised before in this chamber, which is the tax deductibility of spending by corporates if they undertake an advertising campaign.

This concern would have a lot more sincerity if it were also expressed in relation to non-government organisations and trade unions that are basically tax exempt. They do not need to claim tax deductions because they do not pay tax. It is in my view unprecedented to even contemplate the idea and it would be outrageous to suggest that there should be—as suggested in one of the submissions to this report and highlighted in Senator Brown’s comments—a role for the government in, in any way, vetting bodies corporate undertaking advertising.

The idea that simply because something is tax deductible means that it is therefore public money fundamentally blurs the distinction between tax paid and the fact that you have legitimate costs in earning an income. It would be akin to us determining certain behaviours of small business people would be vetted by the government, in this sense of advertising, in order to deem whether we approved it or not before they were allowed to claim tax deductions for it.

There seems to be from some in this chamber an unnecessary focus upon the activities of corporate Australia yet a seeming blindness to the activities of tax-exempt bodies that are not subject to the corporate governance guidelines and to the legal liabilities that company directors in Australia are. Not directly related to this bill, I find those suggestions quite outrageous—that in any way we would have the government taking the processes that we use to deem whether government advertising is legitimate or not and applying them to corporate Australia, when all corporate Australia can do is face itself up against the might that is the Commonwealth with its power to change laws and to levy taxes, yet at the same time to not in any way think, ‘Maybe there are some big NGOs out there, some multinational non-government organisations, that do not pay tax in this country, that have tens of millions of dollars of revenue, that are not subject to scrutiny, that do not have disclosure requirements, that are not subject to the ASX or to ASIC and the requirements we legitimately place on companies.’ I think that to even suggest that betrays the anticorporate agenda and the double standards of some in this chamber.