Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Under Senator Di Natale they will sell out every time, and they have sold out again here today. The prospect is that the Greens are going to come to this chamber and, as they have told us this morning, are going to vote for a watered-down version—a weak, watered-down version—of what the Senate had already passed. Not only that, but they were bragging that they are going to vote against the amendments that were circulated by Senator Muir and Senator Lambie about grandfathering and the grandfathering exemptions—1,500 companies that, once again, will ride again.

We had finally been able to build enough community pressure to actually be able to tackle what had been a very, very difficult issue. This is a sell-out. This is going weak and it is all about Senator Di Natale trying to make himself relevant or important in this debate. The way he has done it is by selling out the cause of tax transparency. If the Australian Greens think that we are going to lie down and let them walk all over us, that we are going to allow them to have these multinational companies have their way then, frankly, they have another thing coming.

Let's be clear here. The government had moved the Tax Laws Amendment (Combating Multinational Tax Avoidance) Bill 2015, which did not go far enough—that was the view of the majority of this chamber. Amendments were made to make the government improve its own legislation. What we have here is a last minute, dead of the night, dirty deal done dirt cheap by a desperate leader of the Greens political party to sell out the cause of all the people, all the evidence, all the testimony, all the community groups, all the organisations that have worked together for two years to make sure that we have greater transparency, that we actually have accountability for what is happening with the Australian tax system. All of that gets undermined when a cheap deal gets done by a desperate leader of a desperate political party who, frankly, either does not understand what he has done or does not care, and I am just not sure which one of those is worse.