Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2018. It is, indeed, an honour and a privilege to be able to speak on yet another treasury laws amendment bill that has been introduced in this place, for this is an area in which the Morrison coalition government and both the Turnbull and Abbott governments before have given considerable thought and have taken action that has actually made a considerable difference to the budget bottom line.

Before I begin my remarks, I'd like to acknowledge the good work of the Commissioner of Taxation, Chris Jordan, who has, within nearly five years in the role, made a significant impact on the ATO, on its operations, on its personnel and also, particularly, on its approach to collecting tax revenue on behalf of the government. You would know, Acting Deputy President Marshall, that the Liberal-National coalition will always be a government of lower taxes. The Liberal Party in particular prides themselves on being a party that values lower taxes and that wants to keep more of what you earn in your pockets. But, at the same time, we are committed to ensuring that those who do earn income in Australia pay their fair share of tax in Australia.

Commissioner Chris Jordan is equally committed to that cause. He is certainly a man that does not take tax avoidance or tax evasion lightly. In fact, at the last Senate estimates he revealed that, particularly in the area of multinational tax avoidance, the new measures that this government have taken, whether it be through the diverted profits tax or the multinational anti-avoidance legislation, have already netted around $5 billion in additional revenue to the ATO and therefore to the budget bottom line. In fact, the ATO said that about 70 companies were being looked at very closely under that multinational anti-avoidance legislation because they were deemed to have a medium to high risk of avoiding a taxable presence in Australia and that 25 companies—I think this was nearly a year ago—had already started to restructure to fall in line with the multinational anti-avoidance legislation. That was because of the tough stance that Commissioner Jordan and the ATO had taken, backed by the federal government's multinational anti-avoidance law.

Microsoft, for example, had previously booked revenue for many of its sales in Australia in low-tax Singapore. But about 12 or so months ago it reached a settlement with the ATO under which it would book a much higher proportion of sales and therefore tax in Australia. Mr Jordan had said that this crackdown on foreign multinationals had very quickly achieved the desired results. As I said, in the 16 months until the end of October—and that was last year—it had flushed out retrospective tax liabilities of more than $5 billion from a swag of global giants operating in Australia. Nearly $1 billion of that was raised in four months alone. Of course, this came ahead of the imminent launches of companies like the retail giant Amazon in Australia, which would have walked into the Australian market with a completely different understanding of its obligations to pay tax in this country than if it had come into the market only 12 or 18 months beforehand. Google is another one of the companies that is targeted. In fact, the Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law and the diverted profits tax were dubbed the 'Google tax'. Facebook, of course, is the other one. It was particularly targeting those very large and quite opaque international companies. In fact, Mr Jordan said that they had an 'intellectual might' associated with them. And prior to this particular piece of legislation, those companies had attempted to intimidate the ATO to some extent to give them lower tax assessments. Mr Jordan noted that some of those multinationals attempted to bamboozle him and bamboozle ATO officials with financial fairytales and they tried to intellectually browbeat the ATO with great big piles of reports and spaghetti diagrams on white boards saying things like, 'Look, we have the greatest experts in the world.'