Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 2) Bill 2021. Labor supports the two schedules of this bill. Schedule 1 makes minor changes to the Income Tax Assessment Act to require non-government entities seeking endorsement as a deductible gift recipient to be a charity registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission or to be operated by a registered charity. This measure to improve the consistency of governance and oversight of deductible gift recipients is a small but welcome change from Mr Morrison's ongoing war on charities.

Mr Morrison's war on charities has ramped up in recent weeks, with the unveiling of new regulations that will allow Mr Morrison's charities commissioner to silence and deregister charities for criticising Mr Morrison, all for speaking out on their core issues. This silencing of opinion is something you might expect from Xi Jinping in China or from Putin in Russia, not here in Australia. Because Mr Morrison has introduced these changes as regulations, rather than as a bill, they do not even need to be approved by parliament. It is antidemocratic. It is chilling.

So what exactly do these regulations say? They say that any Australian charity can be deregistered and shut down if a single employee or volunteer engages in any unlawful conduct. That includes minor trespassing or vandalism. Not only that; charities can also be deregistered and shut down if they fail to ensure their resources are not used to promote or support misconduct. So what does this mean in practice? Some of the most highly respected charities in Australia have shared examples of conduct that might now mean they can be shut down for good. The ACT Council of Social Services CEO, Dr Emma Campbell, said:

If enacted, these new regulations will mean that charities could be deregistered for the most minor of offences such as blocking a footpath at a public vigil or placing a sticker on a lamppost.

The CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, George Selvanera, is reported as saying:

Under these laws,[ the Aboriginal legal service] could be deregistered if one of our employees attended a protest organised by a third party and temporarily obstructed traffic during that protest …

There's also Nicole Hornsby, executive director of Baptist Care Australia, who described the measures as 'totally unreasonable'. The list goes on. The CEO of Vinnies, Toby O'Connor, says:

The administrative burden of monitoring all our activities is enormous and not warranted. Unlawful acts are already covered by existing criminal law. These changes increase red-tape for no good reason.

Kasy Chambers, the executive director of Anglicare Australia said:

… this is silly and it's going to have consequences which will not be good for anybody.

She also said:

Who they'll come after first is anyone's guess …

An open letter from charities including Amnesty International and the Fred Hollows Foundation says:

Our reputations could be harmed, our boards could be stood down and replaced, and at worst, we could be deregistered as charities.

In times of crisis and disaster, we will be forced to slow down our response and seek advice on possible risks created by these unnecessary proposals.

…   …   …

These regulations must be abandoned. The work of Australia's charities should not be stifled when the country needs us the most.

So there you are. The ACT Council of Social Services, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, Baptist Care, Anglicare, Vinnies, the Fred Hollows Foundation and Amnesty International all roundly oppose these regulations. These are the groups that Mr Morrison is trying to crack down on—and 60,000 other charities.

The government's own Treasury review recommended that the existing regulation around 'unlawful conduct' be scrapped—so the laws as they are were already deemed too harsh by the government's own review—but, instead, Mr Morrison wants to dramatically increase the restrictions on charities. We all know why this is happening, and it needs to be called out. Mr Morrison does not want charities, those who advocate for and support the most vulnerable people in Australia, disagreeing with his callous and harmful policies. Remember, Mr Morrison introduces laws which attack vulnerable Australians, such as his deadly robodebt policy; he does not want charities to speak out on their behalf. It's the exact same approach the Morrison government has long taken towards trade unions, because, ultimately, in Mr Morrison's Australia, charities, trade unions and the shrinking middle class are on one side and he is on the other.

Schedule 2 of the bill amends the Income Tax Assessment Act to remove the preferential tax treatment provided for offshore banking units. Offshore banking units are effectively a tax loophole that enables financial services companies to provide banking services to offshore customers. Labor supports this move. It's the least the Morrison government could do to address corporate tax avoidance. After eight years of this government, we still have a third of large companies in Australia paying no tax on their profits. When Mr Morrison and his colleagues were in opposition, they voted against the laws the Labor government proposed to begin closing tax loopholes.

That brings me to the group Mr Morrison is actively trying to protect and shield from criticism: the billionaires who have been rorting the public purse through JobKeeper. Labor is moving an amendment to this bill to create a transparent register of firms with an annual turnover of more than $10 million that received JobKeeper. Mr Morrison's JobKeeper system is unique. It is the only system of its kind in the world that was introduced with zero—zero—transparency. In New Zealand, there is an online register listing all the firms that received their equivalent of JobKeeper. Of course, as a result of that, many New Zealand companies who actually increased their earnings during the pandemic have paid the money back. Here in Australia, there is no online register. There is no requirement for highly profitable companies to pay the money back. The Morrison government has been fighting tooth and nail to stop the Australian public from seeing what it has been doing with their money.

We have barely scratched the surface on companies that actually increased their profits by receiving JobKeeper. Thankfully, through ASX reporting requirements, we do at least know about ASX listed companies that have rorted the system. In fact, according to the corporate advisory group Ownership Matters, nearly 90 per cent of JobKeeper that has been returned has come from public companies. This shows that transparency does cut out the rorting. But there are plenty of highly profitable companies that refuse to pay that money back, and there would be many, many more that we still don't even know about because Mr Morrison opposes JobKeeper transparency. He supports companies being allowed to use public money to pay dividends, pay down debt and pay executive bonuses.

We know who the losers in the Morrison economy are: middle-class Australians who are suffering through eight years of record low wage growth, who are seeing their jobs made insecure and who no longer have middle-class pay for middle-class jobs. We know that charities are losers in Mr Morrison's economy. He has threatened to shut them down for even the most trivial infringements. We know small businesses in Western Sydney are more of Mr Morrison's losers, because they're suffering through months of lockdown because of his botched vaccine rollout.

Who are the winners in the Morrison economy? The billionaires, of course. Mr Morrison's top winner is Gerry Harvey. Harvey Norman more than doubled their profit during COVID-19, while receiving $22 million in JobKeeper. Gerry Harvey did not even have to lift a finger to receive that $22 million, which is many times more than the vast majority of Australians will make in their lifetime. Did Mr Morrison even ask him to pay it back? Of course not. Gerry Harvey took that public money and paid himself a $78 million dividend. This is the same Gerry Harvey who once said:

You could go out and give a million dollars to a charity tomorrow to help the homeless. You could argue that it is just wasted. They are not putting anything back into the community … You are helping a whole heap of no-hopers to survive for no good reason. They are just a drag on the whole community … It helped to keep them alive but did it help our society? No. Society might have been better off without them …

That's Gerry Harvey's view. I think society would be better off without billionaires like Gerry Harvey leeching off the public purse. These are the sorts of vile, sneering billionaires that Mr Morrison is running a protection racket for.

Of course, Gerry Harvey isn't Mr Morrison's only winner. There are other billionaires. James Packer, who is worth $4.69 billion, received $110 million in JobKeeper through his company, Crown. John Gandel, who is worth $5.4 billion, received $11 million in JobKeeper through his company, Vicinity Centres. Brett Blundy, who is worth $2.2 billion, received $6.48 million in JobKeeper through his various retail brands. Of course, there is the pokies king Lenny Ainsworth, worth $4.42 billion, who received $11 million in JobKeeper through his company, Aristocrat Leisure. Aristocrat went on to pay dividends of $63.9 million to shareholders. That's our money. These are the big winners in Mr Morrison's economy, the billionaires who are only ever a quick phone call away from a big, public cash-out from Mr Morrison, with no expectation that they will ever have to pay it back.

At the same time, Mr Morrison has instructed Centrelink to chase with debt recovery notices more than 11,000 workers who received JobKeeper. Those 11,000 working Australians are being hounded for alleged overpayments of JobKeeper. How disgraceful is that?

This gets to the core of why Mr Morrison is so opposed to any transparency around JobKeeper. The truth is that JobKeeper is the biggest corporate and billionaire welfare rort in Australian history. Mr Morrison and his mates, such as Gerry Harvey, could never again sit on their gilded thrones and complain about dole bludgers or welfare recipients. Gerry Harvey is the biggest dole bludger in Australian history. If the Australian public were ever to be given a glimpse of the scale of the rorting that Mr Morrison has allowed through JobKeeper, it would be a national disgrace on par with his botched vaccine rollout.

So I urge the Senate to support the Labor amendments in order to force some desperately needed transparency into the JobKeeper scheme. I note that Senator Patrick and others on the crossbench have also been advocating greater transparency in JobKeeper. It appears that the Australian parliament, with the exception of the Liberal and National parties, is in fact very unified around this cause. I don't know how many members or senators of the Liberal and National parties can go back to their electorates and tell them with a straight face that they are coming to Canberra to represent their interests. If they were to stand here today and vote against this measure, that would increase transparency around JobKeeper rorting. Mr Morrison may be able to go to Canberra and say with a straight face that, no, Gerry Harvey deserves that $22 million welfare payment—he earned it—but I would hope that some of his colleagues could not.

Mr Morrison is, of course, a seasoned veteran of talking out of both sides of his mouth. He runs scare campaigns about debt and deficit while racking up the largest debt and deficit in Australian history—a trillion dollars in debt, thanks in large part to the billions in JobKeeper he has handed out to billionaires. Mr Morrison says that the Australian government could not afford to provide JobKeeper to casual workers, yet he has given Gerry Harvey $20 million in JobKeeper. Mr Morrison says highly profitable big businesses should not have to pay back JobKeeper, yet he hounds 11,000 welfare recipients with JobKeeper debt recovery notices.

There are vaccines, lockdowns, bushfires, aged care, the NDIS, sexual harassment at work and labour hire in the mining sector—the list goes on and on. (Time expired)