Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

in New Zealand for the last 10 years. What a surprise! We discovered the same thing here in Australia. We are in this situation where we have large companies that need to pay their fair share of tax.

Interestingly, Mr Chris Jordan, the head of the Australian tax office was talking about tax avoidance and cracking down on it in a speech last week and said:

The sentiment in Australia is very strong in this regard. The stories and coverage of…base erosion and profit shifting related issues over the past couple of years have led to unprecedented levels of interest in the tax behaviour of large corporates, especially multinationals.

As a result, the new multinational anti-avoidance law, the MAAL, was introduced—

last year and now we have a diverted profits tax, or what is commonly called a 'Google tax' about to come to parliament.

I would also like to put on record my thanks to former Senator Christine Milne who was the Leader of the Greens and who initiated the multinational tax avoidance inquiry in 2013, which led to a large number of inquiries on this subject over a long period of time and which have, of course, snowballed. Thanks to the good work of the Senate, this public sentiment—also driven by a large number of stakeholders, particularly stakeholders like the Tax Justice Network and others who have campaigned on this issue for decades—is finally bearing some fruit. So for One Nation to come in here and say that nothing is being done on tackling the issue of multinational tax avoidance is actually incorrect. In fact, it is so they can set themselves up to look like they have delivered something—an actual policy, a real policy—when in fact, this parliament is actually getting on with doing the job.

Saying that, there is still an absolutely long way to go. The hundreds of millions that might be raised by the legislation about to come to this parliament is nothing on what is needed to raise revenue in this country. It goes nowhere near covering a $40 billion tax cut that we are about to give to corporations. There is much more we need to do in this country to raise revenue. It all about revenue. We need to make sure the petroleum resource rent tax is fixed and, unlike Senator Back, I do not necessarily believe that BHP, Rio Tinto and Chevron—three corporates pinned in our inquiry for not paying enough tax—are actually paying their fair share. (Time expired)