Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Treasury and Finance) Share this | Hansard source

To add to my earlier answer to Senator Anning's contribution—and it does follow on slightly from earlier contributions as well—on the rationale for strict liability, it's worth briefly extracting a little bit from the explanatory memorandum. To follow on from Senator Patterson, the issue around organised crime is an important part of the context for the necessity of strict liability offences. We are increasingly dealing with pretty sophisticated crime networks, and this is one of the tools that can be used. This is from the explanatory memorandum:

Currently, the taxation law contains a variety of offences as well as civil and administrative penalties relating to record keeping and tax evasion. These include penalties for providing false or misleading information to the Commissioner … and incorrectly keeping records with the intent of misleading the Commissioner …

Although these offences may apply to entities that use electronic sales suppression software to incorrectly keep records, the current maximum penalties for the offences under the TAA 1953 are not high enough to adequately reflect the seriousness of using a tool with a principle function of misrepresenting an entity's tax position.

It goes on:

The Criminal Code contained in Schedule 1 to the CCA 1995 also contains offences relating to forgery and providing false documents to the Commonwealth. The manufacture of electronic sales suppression tools may be captured by the Criminal Code under the offence for possessing, making or adapting a device for making forgeries …

However these provisions require either an intention that the device will be used to commit an offence of forgery or only apply to Commonwealth documents. These requirements can be difficult to satisfy in the case of electronic sales suppression tools.

Just finally, from the explanatory memorandum, Senator Anning, even where an electronic sales suppression tool was developed overseas to falsify records that are kept for Australian tax purposes, it may be difficult to demonstrate the tool was made or supplied specifically with the intention of defrauding the Commonwealth rather than other jurisdictions. So it is just a further piece of evidence as to the background: (1) you're dealing with organised crime; (2) you're dealing with very sophisticated areas; (3) currently, there could be someone who clearly had malicious intent but you're still not able to prove it because of the complexity of some of these crimes. Therefore I would say to you again, Senator Anning, that the use of strict liability in these circumstances is absolutely justified.