Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

The government will not support this amendment. In fact, we oppose this amendment. On 15 October 2015, parliament passed a bill to amend the legislation which previously directed the Commissioner of Taxation to publish confidential tax information of Australian controlled private companies. The government introduced that amendment because publication of the taxation information of these companies would have, effectively, disclosed the owners' financial affairs and posed a risk to their position in the market by making key economic information available to their competitors and suppliers.

It is important to note that the amendment has no impact on the comprehensive powers of the Commissioner of Taxation to require companies to produce any information that is relevant to making an assessment of their tax liability—powers he already has. The public disclosure of tax information law will continue to apply to multinational enterprises operating in Australia and to Australian public companies. The government has made clear that every company—indeed, every taxpayer—must pay the right amount of tax. To that end, it has tightened the thin capitalisation laws applicable to the amount of interest that may be deducted and has introduced new legislation to tackle tax avoidance by large multinational groups—specifically, the bill that is being considered by the Senate today.

Given that Senator Whish-Wilson has suggested that the reason for this amendment is that he feels misled by the so-called Family Office Institute Australia, there are a number of much more senior and very reputable organisations that have advanced the same arguments. Just because there is a question mark over the credibility of an organisation pursuing a particular argument does not make the argument wrong, particularly when you have the Law Council of Australia and PwC supporting the amendments that the government has made to the legislation and which Senator Whish-Wilson is seeking to reverse.

We do not support this Greens amendment for the reasons that we have outlined. This bill will have to come back before the Senate and the Senate will have to make a judgement on whether it wants the tax commissioner to have additional powers to enforce tax compliance by multinationals and, essentially, to ensure that we have better powers for the tax commissioner to prosecute multinational tax avoidance more effectively. The amendments that have been passed and that are now being flagged in relation to this particular measure will delay the implementation of this legislation which, of course, significantly boosts the powers of the tax commissioner to take effective action against tax avoidance. The Senate has to be very conscious of the fact that we will have to deal with this legislation again, when we could be getting it onto the statute books much more quickly and much more efficiently.