Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to speak on the Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2014 Measures No. 5) Bill 2014, I am reflecting that it is sad that the pattern of this legislation is so familiar. It is a pattern we have got used to. It is a pattern of a government that is focusing its attacks on the people that can least afford to be attacked—the poorest in our society, the people that need support—and ignoring the potential ways of balancing our budget by looking at the big end of town. In this legislation, there are attacks on workers, on older people and on science and development.

The measures that are laid out in this legislation are going to save a relatively measly amount of money. In comparison, if we had a government that was serious about really looking at where the money could be coming from and how it could be balancing the budget, it would be looking at things like making our superannuation system fairer and saving billions of dollars by doing that; removing fossil fuel subsidies and saving billions of dollars by doing that; and increasing the tax on the big profits of the big four banks. These sorts of measures, revenue-raising measures, are the sorts of things that would be really making a difference in balancing our budget, but instead we have an ideological attack on the people that can least afford to pay. The Greens are committed to maintaining strong protections for Australian workers and the industries that support them. So we are seeking to amend this bill, and we will be opposing the changes to the seafarers tax offset, to the research and development tax offset and to the mature age worker tax offset.

I want to start with the seafarers tax offset. Schedule 2 of this bill proposes to abolish this. In its current form, the seafarers tax offset applies to seafarers in a ship for which a company has the appropriate certificate and where the company employs the crew member for at least 91 days a year for these journeys. This tax incentive goes a long way to ensuring workers on overseas journeys can get a decent pay and it keeps their jobs viable, and it costs us the measly sum of $2 million a year. For the sake of $2 million a year, the government is continuing to apply measures that are going to be making it more and more difficult to employ Australian workers on our seas and to have Australian-flagged ships plying our coast.

You can see that there are all sorts of measures that are all coming together to completely decimate the Australian shipping industry, and that will be a disaster. It will be a disaster for the Australian workforce but also a disaster for us having good work conditions and safe environmental conditions for the ships that are in our waters. It is a tiny saving that the government is trying to achieve, and for that it is going to ditch security for workers and our shipping industry at the very time that they need our support. We must not let it happen. Right now, what the Australian shipping industry needs is certainty. The industry is awaiting the results of the minister's options paper. The last thing it needs is to be forced to negotiate the storm that abolishing this tax incentive would create.

The policy as it stands at the moment, which is going to be abolished, also promotes professional development and training of workers by including this in the period deemed to be on a voyage. This is an essential measure to train up Australian shipping workers and give them the know-how to maintain our status as a major shipping nation. It is a status that we do not need to let go. We have options. There are constructive ways forward for us to maintain a strong, healthy, viable Australian shipping industry with good working conditions for the seafarers and with good environmental protections.

Perhaps most importantly, the Australian shipping industry can be a shipping industry that is competitive with the rest of the world, because it needs to be that. It truly is an international business. The industry operates in a market that is largely tax free in international terms and in which other players—seafarers on other countries' ships—are given similar tax incentives. So to take away this benefit from our workers will be putting them at a disadvantage to the rest of the world just when we need to be doing everything we can in order to maintain their jobs.

The government argues that the seafarers tax offset has had a low uptake. But, while uptake numbers might appear low at first glance, the reality is that it reflects the small number of Australian ships operating internationally. We need to be maintaining those ships and increasing the number of Australian ships operating. At the moment we have a small number of ships, but it is a vital industry and a tax measure that we must keep.

Schedule 1 of this bill abolishes the mature age tax offset and removes access to this incentive for older workers to remain in the workforce. Up to a million Australians are receiving this at the moment. We all know the challenges that Australia is facing from our ageing population, and we need to be doing whatever we can to support older Australians continuing to participate in the workforce. We know that the government knows that that is what they are trying to do. We have seen in the media this week measures to try to maintain and encourage older Australians to stay in the workforce. The mature age tax offset puts $500 in the pockets of mature age workers as an extra incentive to get them to stay in the workforce, and we do not accept that ripping $760 million from older Australian workers is a fair thing to do. It is part of the Abbott government's unfair budget cuts. The Greens are committed to improving older Australians' access to and participation in work and believe that the government needs to be doing more, not less, including supporting employers where it is appropriate. Because of this, the Greens are going to be moving to amend this bill and remove this schedule from the bill.

Schedule 3 of the bill, of course, continues the Abbott government's attacks on science and research and development. The bill cuts 1½ per cent from the research and development offsets available to businesses and rips $620 million out of research and development spending over the forward estimates. This, again, is just what we do not need to be doing to have a prosperous Australia. We know that increasing investment in science and research is the way forward. We know that our wellbeing, our security and our economic viability as a nation depend on this research and on our having an innovative economy that is using our brains. That is where we are going to be able to continue to compete on the world stage. The government tries to justify this cut by saying it brings it into line with business tax cuts also outlined in the budget, but this cut will occur a year before those possible tax cuts, and the passage of those tax cuts through the Senate is, of course, by no means certain.

Of course, these cuts to research and development also come on top of the cuts to the R&D tax offset that targeted large company investment that recently passed the Senate. This is insanity—it is totally the direction that we should not be going. The insanity of these cuts is reinforced and underlined by the government's own figures on science expenditure. Just as we know that science increasingly needs to underpin our future as a nation, we are set to spend less on science and research this year than we did in 1979. We know that, over the past few decades, science and research has become increasingly important to our society and economy. The rot began under Labor in 2012, but Tony Abbott is taking spending on science and research to the equal lowest level since records began. We have had cuts to CSIRO. CSIRO scientists have been taking voluntary redundancy packages across the country. CSIRO scientists who have been working for decades are no longer going to have their contribution to our country used and valued. We have seen cuts to clean energy programs, and the cuts to tax concessions for R&D such as the cuts in this bill have contributed to this woeful result of spending on science and research being at its equal lowest level since records began.

We will never be able to compete with China or India on wages, but we have the potential to be stronger on research and innovation. That needs secure and significant public investment, something that other countries have certainly twigged to. We are trailing way behind countries that are our competitors in the world—countries like Germany, the UK and US—and we are outspent by key trading partners like Korea and Japan.

A few weeks ago, I visited a car component manufacturer in Adelaide, Precision Components, who are trying to work out how they can survive with the car industry disappearing from Australia. They are desperate to maintain their business. They are desperately trying to be innovators and doing a lot of research and development to discover new markets for themselves. They told me that some 50 per cent of their workforce are now employed in engineering as opposed to being workers on the factory floor manufacturing the products. Fifty per cent of them are in the engineering part of the business. This is the sort of business that needs to be supported by research and develop grants that enable us to have the innovation that would allow Australia to continue to compete on the world stage and to continue to provide jobs for Australians.

We keep cutting spending on science, research and innovation—and these spending cuts are happening because they are seen as being something that no-one will notice. It is just a small amount; the scientists are not going to complain very much; no-one will think about it. If we keep doing this, the country's brain drain will continue and we will wake up after the mining boom to find we are a hollowed-out, uneducated quarry with nothing left to sell to the rest of the world.

The Greens will always be committed to Australian workers and to maintaining innovation in our key industries. That is why we will seek to amend this bill, to remove these idealistic attacks on our workers.