Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to encourage the Senate to insist on the amendment. It is a very simple amendment. It's not offensive in any way. It requires the tax commissioner to publish the names of entities who receive JobKeeper, the number of individuals for whom the entity received the JobKeeper payment and the total amount that they received, with the option of also publishing information about how much the entity has paid back. For a company to profit from JobKeeper was never the intention of the fund. There are companies that have paid back JobKeeper because it is the right thing to do. It's a very simple amendment. It's really an amendment that was basically put together by looking at what happens on the New Zealand government website, where they basically display this information. Just to be very, very clear: it does not display any company information at all; it displays the amount of money that the taxpayer gave to the company to support them.

I heard Senator Birmingham on television this morning trying to justify the government's approach. It was a wet-lettuce-leaf attempt at a justification. Let everyone understand exactly what is happening here: after the taxpayer pays their tax, the money is taken and given to companies and some of them are funnelling that into dividends and into executive bonuses, and, sadly, Minister Birmingham thinks that is okay. He thinks that's all right. Don't worry; it is only taxpayers' money. I can tell you that the people of South Australia are really angry about this. It can be fixed by doing something that is relatively simple. It's what New Zealand has done, and it just involves the publication of the recipients and how much they received. This is what it's like to be in the Liberal Party: you have business mates and you get to support them at the expense of regular voters, regular Australians.

I introduced the motion and I thank the Senate for supporting it. It went to the other place and, unsurprisingly, because it is dominated by the Liberal-National coalition, they removed the amendment. The Senate has the ability to insist on the motion, and that's what we're being asked to do now. I'm happy for Senator Gallagher to stand up on a point of order and say I'm misleading the chamber, but unfortunately the Labor Party are not going to support it this time around. It's almost unimaginable. I've been contacted by a whole range of Labor supporters this morning that have indicated they will not be Labor supporters after this event here in the chamber. Basically, what's happened is the Labor Party were pretending to support a transparency measure. They were pretending to care about workers who pay tax. They were pretending to have high moral fibre and social integrity. And, of course, we now find out it was a ruse. There's no reasonable proposition or explanation you can have for the fact that over the weekend somehow the Labor Party has backflipped on this. I don't think they've backflipped; they just lack courage. They pretend that they support these things but in fact they don't.

Why are we seeing what's happening here? Why are we seeing Labor walking away from this measure? The answer's really simple: they don't want it to go back to the House and have the Prime Minister basically reject the bill. But they haven't even got the politics right. The reason this bill is necessary is that the Prime Minister failed Sydney. He failed through a lack of national quarantine and he failed because of the vaccine rollout, and that's left Sydney in lockdown. If the Labor Party think that Scott Morrison is going to reject a bill that helps Sydney get out of the mess that he created, then I say that they haven't thought this through. If there were ever a bill where the Labor Party could have said, 'You know what, we're going to stand our ground; we're going to stand up for the right thing to do,' it's this bill. What this tells the Australian public is that under no circumstances will the Labor Party stand up for Australians.

I think I said in the chamber last year that I was going to help you with your marketing. I'm going to buy you a dog. I am going to buy you a dog and it's going to be a dog that rolls over every time a Liberal Party member walks into the room, because that's exactly what you're doing here. I had a meeting with a senior coalition minister last year—it was about this time last year—and what this person said to me was, 'Rex, I love playing chicken with the Labor Party because they always swerve.' You have no courage. You need to stand up and actually support something that you believe in instead of getting worried about the politics. Instead of being incapable of explaining what's happening to your voters, to your supporters, you're simply saying, 'No, that's too hard.' It's much, much easier to reject the amendment, and the Australian taxpayer will suffer; the very workers that you claim are your constituents will suffer. It's not on, and the Australian public will hold you to account on this—certainly the crossbench will, but the Australian public are watching. I urge you, Senator Gallagher, to change position and support this amendment to insist that it stays in the bill.