Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (Gifts) Bill 2015. This is a relatively minor piece of legislation which simply adds two new charities to the list of deductible gift recipients listed by name in Australia's tax act. Labor supports it in full, particularly acknowledging that one of the charities—the National Apology Foundation—has been established by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to continue building on the work that he did in office to close the gap between Australia's Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

But I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about Australia's charity regulations more broadly. Australia's income tax law designates some charitable organisations as deductible gift recipients. Donations above $2 to these organisations may be claimed as a tax deduction by individual donors. In this way, deductible gift recipient status helps eligible funds and entities attract financial support from the public for their charitable activities.

In order to qualify as a deductible gift recipient, organisations must be registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, the ACNC, and meet annual public reporting requirements to that agency. The ACNC is one of Labor's proud achievements from our time in government. We established it to act as a one-stop shop for charity regulation and a resource for Australians seeking to make good decisions about how to spend their donor dollars. By contrast, this government still has an official policy to scrap it. I was a member of the economics committee that had a look at this legislation, and I was very pleased to be part of that committee and to recommend that the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission be established. It was clear that there was a complete lack of oversight for charities in this country for many years.

The commission opened its doors in December 2012, and the inimitable Susan Pascoe was appointed as its inaugural commissioner. She has held that post ever since, through some very trying times for the commission. Susan deserves to be acknowledged for the enormous contribution she has made in building the commission from the ground up and steering it through the significant milestones it has achieved in just a few years. Amongst those milestones are building the Australian-first national charities register, which now has over 58,000 charities on its list. Thanks to the register, we know that the two charities which this bill awards deductible gift recipient status to—International Jewish Relief Limited and the National Apology Foundation Limited—are properly registered charities which are up to date with their reporting obligations. It was never possible for members of the public to easily check these details before.

When Labor set up the charities commission back in 2012, we hoped to one day make it a national scheme like those in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Instead of operating parallel state and federal regulatory schemes, we would like to get to a point where any not-for-profit that registers with the national charities commission would automatically be registered in their home state as well. They would also qualify for state concessions and exemptions simply by becoming a deductible gift recipient at the federal level. That is how things already work for not-for-profits in South Australia and the ACT. Earlier in the year New South Wales Labor announced that a future Foley government would sign that state up too. The governments in those jurisdictions have progressively linked their charities rules to the national scheme over the past few years, cutting red tape for local groups and streamlining government in one go.

But we cannot move forward with this until the current government commits to keeping the charities commission open. Labor has been pushing for some years now to get such a commitment from the government, and there have been some welcome signs in the past few months that they may have reconsidered their position. Treasurer Scott Morrison has recently made some comments suggesting that the government has all but abandoned its election commitment to scrap the charities commission. I hope he formalises that by withdrawing the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (Repeal) (No. 1) Bill 2014 from the parliament. Some months ago now, senators in this place passed a motion formally calling on the government to withdraw the ACNC abolishment bill from the lower house. They have not yet done that, but I will take this opportunity today in talking about the Tax Laws Amendment (Gifts) Bill to again urge them to do so.

Formally committing to keep the commission would give more state governments the confidence to link their own rules to it. There is no good reason that charities should continue filling out duplicate sets of paperwork when the commission could be their simple one-stop shop. Similarly, there is no real benefit to having state and federal governments both making rulings about which groups qualify as charities or what supports and exemptions they should be entitled to.

A future Shorten Labor government would give the sector more certainty by keeping the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and continuing to develop the kind of harmonised national scheme I have just outlined. That would be good for charities. It would be efficient. It would be effective. It would reduce red tape. It would be good for the two organisations that will receive deductible gift recipient status thanks to this bill, and it would be good for the hundreds of thousands of other Australian charities as well.