Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. I note here that the law firm King & Wood Mallesons have looked at the government's amendments, which were designed, of course, to address the government's admission, in their own report, that the bill was pretty ordinary. King & Wood Mallesons have said that the current hurdle of the operation of the provision, which I referred to before is in relation to the established practice test, is based on any variance from the existing dividend policy, irrespective of its materiality. King & Wood Mallesons go on to say that the government's amendments are meaningless and worthless, because the established practice test remains intact under this particular suite of amendments from the government.

So, you have to ask yourself: why would the government be pursuing amendments that are not going to be effective? Of course, the proposition that was accepted by the government and by us in the report—I thought—was that imputation should not be disturbed if it is going to massively disrupt the ability of companies to raise capital and then pay a franked dividend. If these amendments are only going to be effectively window dressing so the government can say, 'Yes, we responded to the Senate's report with some sort of amendments', but they have no market impact, and the capacity of a company to pay a franked dividend remains imperilled, then what is the point of these amendments?

I know that some people will have a view on whether these amendments improve the position in relation to dividend reinvestment programs. If that is the case then that may be worth looking at closely. But the substantive point here is that these amendments, according to all the legal advice we've been able to obtain in the past few days, are rubbish—these are rubbish amendments on a rubbish bill designed to a fix a problem that was solved six years ago. The reality is that the government wouldn't be doing this—wouldn't be rustling around down in the Treasury trying to find a few bucks here and a few bucks there—if they weren't running a fiscally irresponsible budget stance.

That is what this is all about. It's about going around and accumulating a few bucks here and a few bucks there because they've got to pay for their big spending, which the Reserve Bank itself is telling the government to stop doing, because the government's major problem is that it is not running a contractionary fiscal problem when it should be running that, to complement the Reserve Bank. As a result, the Reserve Bank is ratcheting up interest rates on Australian families because the government is not doing its job, which is to run a sensible, prudent fiscal policy.