Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As Deputy Chair and on behalf of the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, I present the report of the committee on the Preventing the Misuse of Government Advertising Bill 2010, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I would like to commence my comments on this by thanking the secretariat of the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, who laboured under a particularly heavy workload over the last week. This bill, as the Senate knows, was referred to us late last week and required work at odd hours and over the weekend in conjunction with other references. So I would like, on behalf of the entire committee, to recognise and thank them for that work.

The tight time frame for this bill under consideration meant that we did not have the time to receive the normal number of submissions—it was less than a handful—and I will not take too much of the Senate’s time today in outlining the details of coalition senators’ views other than to highlight the concern that we have with the potential for this bill to compromise the independence of the Auditor-General. The Auditor-General has a time-honoured and very important role in overseeing the management and financial performance of Commonwealth entities, and the potential for this bill to interfere with that is a particular risk that has not convinced coalition senators of its merits.

This bill has arisen in the last few days partly because of the outrageous and unprecedented hypocrisy of the ALP with respect to government advertising—particularly with regard to the Senate itself when the government specifically held over release of documentation regarding the latest government advertising campaign on mining until the morning after Senate estimates had concluded. Specifically, the day after the committee had rescheduled its hearings to allow consideration of government advertising to accommodate the minister on the Thursday morning, it was still then held over to be released on Friday morning.

I would like to highlight and express my own personal concerns with some of the comments made in the part of the report submitted by the Greens and Senator Bob Brown. Senator Brown highlights a concern not directly related to this bill, but that is an issue that has been raised before in this chamber, which is the tax deductibility of spending by corporates if they undertake an advertising campaign.

This concern would have a lot more sincerity if it were also expressed in relation to non-government organisations and trade unions that are basically tax exempt. They do not need to claim tax deductions because they do not pay tax. It is in my view unprecedented to even contemplate the idea and it would be outrageous to suggest that there should be—as suggested in one of the submissions to this report and highlighted in Senator Brown’s comments—a role for the government in, in any way, vetting bodies corporate undertaking advertising.

The idea that simply because something is tax deductible means that it is therefore public money fundamentally blurs the distinction between tax paid and the fact that you have legitimate costs in earning an income. It would be akin to us determining certain behaviours of small business people would be vetted by the government, in this sense of advertising, in order to deem whether we approved it or not before they were allowed to claim tax deductions for it.

There seems to be from some in this chamber an unnecessary focus upon the activities of corporate Australia yet a seeming blindness to the activities of tax-exempt bodies that are not subject to the corporate governance guidelines and to the legal liabilities that company directors in Australia are. Not directly related to this bill, I find those suggestions quite outrageous—that in any way we would have the government taking the processes that we use to deem whether government advertising is legitimate or not and applying them to corporate Australia, when all corporate Australia can do is face itself up against the might that is the Commonwealth with its power to change laws and to levy taxes, yet at the same time to not in any way think, ‘Maybe there are some big NGOs out there, some multinational non-government organisations, that do not pay tax in this country, that have tens of millions of dollars of revenue, that are not subject to scrutiny, that do not have disclosure requirements, that are not subject to the ASX or to ASIC and the requirements we legitimately place on companies.’ I think that to even suggest that betrays the anticorporate agenda and the double standards of some in this chamber.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Firstly, I too would like to thank the staff of the Finance and Administration Legislation Committee who have worked over the weekend to help produce the report we now have before us because of the presumption that we as a parliament may not be meeting before the election; therefore, legislation about this matter needed to be passed this week. I will be moving a contingent motion to allow this bill to be debated in the morning, as senators will know.

However, we are talking here about the report and I would like to respond to the honourable Senator Ryan, who has just spoken for the coalition. Here we have the time-honoured coalition position of opposing but not offering an alternative. It behoves the opposition to do better than that. It leaves the Greens as the constructive opposition in this place, as we have seen repeatedly in the last three years, and here we are again. The opposition’s contribution to the committee report takes out-of-date matters and offers nothing new whatsoever.

What the honourable member is saying is that there should be no rolling in either of the government’s ability to spend money—as we have seen with the $38 million allocation of money for its advocacy of the mining boom tax—or of the corporates on the other side, who are alleged to be spending up to as much as $100 million. One report on Four Corners indicated that BHP may spend as much as the government—that is, $38 million—of which we know they will get a 30 per cent tax break.

The simple figure there is that some $10 million plus is taken out of the public purse to pursue their advertising campaign. The opposition is always very good at saying, ‘What about some other entity that is an NGO, that does not have profitability or that would not be covered?’ I challenge the opposition to support the Greens in adopting the Canadian model of ending donations from all entities to political parties for advertising purposes for a starter and to cover such matters as this advertising so that the practice is stopped, but the opposition will not do that because it has a double standard when it comes to this matter.

The committee in its concluding comments and recommendations on this bill fails to acknowledge the widespread community concern about it as a critical issue that has been of high contention in the last three or four weeks. As the report notes, there is a long history of concerns and various attempts to address the issue of transparency and accountability in the expenditure of public funds through government information and advertising campaigns. This recent public outcry over the government’s $38 million mining tax advertising campaign is testament to the depth of concern on the issue.

This bill is a necessary step in enshrining accountability and integrity mechanisms in law to provide certainty and clarity to governments and to provide assurance and confidence to the community that these practices will be properly implemented and scrutinised. The recommendations by the committee that the bill not proceed contradict the evidence of the four expert submissions which all welcomed the bill for establishing clear legislative provisions around the use of public funds for government advertising. Maybe the government, because the opposition failed in this, will be able to explain why those four expert submissions have been ignored in the findings of the committee.

Each submission from the experts noted that the bill incorporated important changes to strengthen the original 2008 guidelines based on experience of the past two years in which the process has been operational. While the submissions varied in their view of the role of the Auditor-General in the bill there is agreement that the Auditor-General had a key role to play in the review of government advertising campaigns and their assessment against the guidelines.

As you know, Acting Deputy President, my bill gives the Auditor-General a vetting role but not a decision-making role as the opposition would have it. The Auditor-General’s submission in particular made a number of relatively minor technical amendments to the bill for greater clarity and transparency in the process, and these are recommendations which the Greens will take up. I will move suitable amendments when the bill is debated in the Senate, if the Senate so chooses, tomorrow. Other submissions have identified minor elements of the bill that require rewording for clarity, and those will also be addressed.

I draw attention to the important issue of corporate political advertising and the use of tax-deductibility claims by corporate advertisers. I began by talking about this but the opposition has problems. I have raised concerns elsewhere that under current arrangements taxpayers are effectively funding corporate advertising campaigns on the mining tax to the tune of millions of dollars. The corporate advertisers should be subject to the same regime of accountability and scrutiny that is required of government advertising expenditure and deprived of the ability, through tax-deductibility, to have taxpayers’ millions support their campaigns. That is a matter for another piece of legislation; however, I make the commitment, as I have done publicly, that when the next suitable tax bill comes before this place I will move to amend it so that corporate taxpayers cannot deduct political advertising campaigns and so gain a windfall 30 per cent subsidy of their campaigns at the expense of taxpayers. That is money that other—

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is that for not-for-profits too?

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you find a way of doing that we would be happy to look at it. What I can tell you, Senator Birmingham, through the Chair, is that your report on this committee’s inquiry has come up with no alternatives, no suggestions, nothing constructive whatsoever. I would have thought you could have done better than that, as you have been out publicly condemning the government’s use of $38 million in campaign funds on the mining boom tax. I would have thought you could have come up with just something constructive. But the opposition has failed in that test, and that is why the Greens have a bill before the parliament—because we intend to remain constructive opponents when we oppose government or, for that matter, government legislation. The rule is: if you oppose something, come up with something better. We are past that. The opposition has failed miserably in its contribution to this committee’s report.

Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On taking note of this report there are two quick points that I would like to make. As a government senator on the committee, I commend the work of the secretariat in relation to the overall activity that has been occurring in political advertising, because the secretariat has been working not only on this bill, which the Greens have introduced, but also on a referral to the references committee, moved by Family First, and, indeed, on a reopening of the estimates argued for by the opposition. So there are three other areas of activity on political advertising that the Senate committee has been caught up with just in this week.

In the much broader context, following on from some of the comments from Senator Brown, I think we need to take stock here of the Auditor-General’s position. Despite his concerns with the revised guidelines, he said very clearly in estimates that the current guidelines remain:

... a significant improvement on what occurred in this area in the past.

Thank you, Senator Brown, for reminding me that that is a point that the opposition, in their campaigning on this issue, are very, very quick to forget. The other reason I stand now to take note is simply to seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.