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

Our time frame starts in 2018. My understanding is that the financial institutions will be required to report on the high-value accounts held by individuals to the ATO by the middle of 2018 and report high-value accounts held by corporate entities by 2019. There has been no rationale given for delaying the reporting on corporate entity accounts by 12 months. The real question is: why is there one deadline, in the middle of 2018, for individuals and another for high-value accounts held by corporate entities in 2019? I want to flag that this may perhaps form the basis of an amendment—which, being conscious of time, I suspect will not be moved this evening.

The world is moving in a particular direction on this front. We have a situation where 40 like-minded OECD nations will already have begun the process of sharing this type of information, and what worries me is that Australia is going to fall behind. While there have been many disagreements in this chamber about the nature of the bill and amendments to different parts of the bill, I think former Treasurer Joe Hockey and the tax commissioner have done an incredible job on the international stage and played a very important role in making Australia world leaders in some of these areas. Again, that does not mean I think all the legislation has been perfect. The criticism that people like me have made is not that the laws that this government has tried to pass have necessarily been bad or ineffective laws; the criticism has largely been that the laws they passed have not gone far enough—and that really has been where the debate here has gone. The question is: why do you have two separate dates for reporting, one for individuals by the middle of 2018 and another for corporate entities by 2019? Why doesn't this bill bring those two dates together?