Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The government, in its zeal to balance the budget, never looks to those who are most able to afford it. The top end of town, the wealthy miners, the resource companies, the banks—we never see them being asked to pay a bit more to help balance the budget. It is always everyone else who is asked to share the burden. In this legislation we see measures that, even while only offering very small savings, are going to affect people's livelihoods and jobs—and that are going to affect the future growth of industries that will sustain this country when the mining boom is over and the rest of the world tells us to stop digging.

One of the measures contained in the Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2014 Measures No. 5) Bill 2014 is the abolition of the seafarer tax offset. This offset provides a rebate to an employer of Australian seafarers for withholding tax paid on the wages and salaries of those seafarers while on overseas voyages. The object of the offset is essentially to encourage a domestic shipping industry—and employment in that industry—by making the employment of Australian staff on ships no more burdensome than employing someone from another country. The seafarer tax offset goes some way towards stimulating employment of locals in the sector. The offset for the employers who do the right thing and employ locals is significant for them. It might mean the difference between employing a local or employing someone from another country, perhaps a country that does not have the same standards of employment that we enjoy in Australia—our minimum wages or our safety standards.

The cost of the seafarer tax offset to the government, on the other hand, is small. Even though the benefit of the offset is large and helps employment, the cost to the government is small. We are looking at a cost of $8 million over the forward estimates. The budget papers state that the government will achieve savings of $12 million over three years but that in underlying cash terms the saving is $8 million over the forward estimates period. For the sake of $8 million, why is this government prepared to make it more difficult for people who operate ships in and around Australia to employ Australian crew? It is an ideological tack—nothing else. For the sake of $8 million, which is less than a rounding error in the context of four years of the budget, they are prepared to threaten the ability of companies to employ local labour at a rate that is competitive with overseas labour.

Also in this bill is another attack by the government on research and development. Our Prime Minister's views on science—and in particular his view that the science of climate change is 'crap'—are well known. It seems that this attitude to science is to be demonstrated yet again through a reduction in the research and development tax incentive. The countries that are going to do well in the 21st century are those that invest in innovation and research and development. Australian is never going to be able to compete with China or India on wages. It is a losing game for us to try to do that. What we can compete on is our brains and our innovation. What we need to do is not only properly fund research at our universities and through our research councils—something that the government is intent on attacking—but encourage the private sector to invest in research and development as well. On the whole, Australian does poorly when it comes to involving people with PhDs in private sector research and development. We rank quite low. There is also the perennial complaint from companies that good ideas get developed in Australia and then they feel that they need to move overseas because other countries will provide a much more supportive ecosystem for their research and development.

One of the good things that we have in this country is the R&D tax incentive which encourages companies to direct money that they might otherwise spend elsewhere into research and development. What the government wants to do in this bill is reduce the rate of the tax offset that is available under the research and develop tax incentive by 1½ percentage points from 1 July 2014. The government's justification for it is that it is okay because at some later stage it is going to reduce the company tax rate by 1½ per cent as well. I disagree with that. But if that is what the government wants to do, isn't it incredible that it is prepared to say it will cut your tax rate at some time in the future but it is going to cut your benefits now?

For the sake of $620 million, the government is prepared to diminish this country's investment in research and development. When you put this side by side with $111 million in cuts to CSIRO and the 20 per cent cuts to university funding, you can see why, under this government, 'science is crap' has become a mantra. It has become their guiding principle that underlies this budget and this legislation. This is the most antiscience government we have seen for a while, and now we are seeing it flow through to a tax on research and development.

One of the other elements of this bill that would not be supported, from our perspective, is the mature age worker tax offset. This is a measure that, at the moment, provides an incentive for workers to stay in the workforce. This was introduced in 2004-05 and it is worth up to $500 a year for individual mature age workers. The government says we can do this because we are now providing an incentive to employers to continue to employ people. But there is a difference because that money that they are providing to employers is not necessarily going to find its way into the pockets of these people who stay in the workforce—that is, it will go to the employers but not necessarily to the employees. So, yet again, we have the prospect—it is a bit like the R&D tax cut—of, 'Trust us, we might give you some benefit in the future, but we are going to take away the benefit you have got now.'

That is not the way to balance the budget. If the government were serious about balancing the budget, it would look to those who can afford it the most and ask them to pay their fair share. As it is, we know that this government is turning its sights on the young, the old, the sick and the poor. We are now finding it turning its sights on companies that invest in R&D and companies that try and do the right thing by employing local workers to work on ships surrounding Australia. For those reasons we are not in a position to support the bill.

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