Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator Whish-Wilson today relating to corporate tax avoidance.

Of all the important issues that we are talking about around the country, going into whatever happens with a federal election in the next few months, from the feedback I have received the most important issue is that of tax avoidance—both multinational tax avoidance and tax avoidance by wealthy individuals. The Panama papers and the recent Four Corners Mossack Fonseca expose have certainly reignited public interest in this issue, but I must say that this chamber, the Senate—and Senator Ketter talked a bit about this earlier—including the economics committee that I have been involved with, has been looking very closely at this issue. In fact, Senator Milne, who is no longer with us, was the one who instigated the Senate inquiry into multinational tax avoidance, where we uncovered a lot of troubling information.

Very importantly, on 12 May, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, will be hosting a summit that has been essentially driven by the revelations from the Panama papers. And there is a big outcry in the UK that the government has to finally step up and do something about this issue. There are some simple laws that governments here and in the UK can enact to make a difference on this issue. The fundamental problem is a problem of secrecy. It is a problem of lack of transparency and the need for disclosure. As was discovered on the Four Corners expose, individuals and companies are dodging their obligations to pay taxes that pay for hospitals and that pay for schools, because tax havens, or what are called 'secrecy jurisdictions', around the world are allowing organisational structures, front companies, shelf companies and trusts to hide the identity of wealthy companies and wealthy individuals. There is a whole layer of barriers put in place to allow that secrecy and to prevent the beneficial ownership of those structures from being known.

The Greens have, very sensibly, released a policy package that can help combat this issue. We are leading on this issue around the country. One of the things that we have outlined in policy is a register of beneficial ownership. If each country around the world forced people to sign a paper or tick a box that said, 'This is a beneficial owner of this company that owns these assets and has all this money in it,' then we would be halfway to solving this international problem of a parallel universe where wealthy people use loopholes to get out of paying their tax. The second part of secrecy which we need to overcome involves the exchange of information between countries. If we could identify the beneficial owners of these shelf companies and then have a system that allowed tax jurisdictions to exchange information, then we would make a significant dent in this issue. That is what we need to work on.

The solution sounds simple. The biggest problem, the reason why we cannot do anything about it, is that people in chambers like this do not give a damn about it. The reason they do not give a damn about it is that a lot of the money they receive in corporate donations and donations from wealthy individuals is used for elections and their re-election. This is the same in the UK. The UK has an even bigger issue that Prime Minister David Cameron has to tackle, and that is that it is actually UK jurisdictions, like the ones I outlined in my question, that are being used, primarily, around the world for the kind of money laundering and tax dodging that goes on. It is not just small countries like Panama, the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands; the big national economies like the US, the UK and Australia are not doing enough. In fact, if anything, they are getting in the way of global agreements.

So the Greens released a package last week—18 policies, many of them fully costed—that will make money for the Australian people, that will bring in billions of dollars of revenue, by cracking down on tax cheats so that that money can be used and spent in this country on the things that are needed. Potentially, tens of billions of dollars can be returned to the tax department, if we properly resource it, reverse the job cuts, give new laws to ASIC, new laws of disclosure around this country, and actually use government policy to penalise multinational corporations that will not exchange information with the government or that operate out of dodgy tax jurisdictions like we heard of Wilson Security doing, during the Four Corners expose—half a billion dollars of government contracts and we do not know if they pay any tax. Surely we can make a difference. The Greens are leading on this issue. I am very proud to say that we will continue to do this going into the election. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.