Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to have a few minutes to make some comments on the Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment Bill 2014. In particular, this bill has five schedules which tighten the debt limits settings in the thin capitalisation rules to ensure that multinationals do not allocate a disproportionate amount of debt to their Australian operations. There is a range of other reforms, including reforms exempting foreign non-portfolio dividends, amendments to the Income Tax Assessment Act to ensure that foreign resident capital gains tax operates as intended and a number of other miscellaneous amendments to the taxation and superannuation laws.

The good thing about these is that they were done under Labor. It is Labor that did the work, and there was a whole package of measures on multinational tax avoidance, in particular. It is work that was done by former Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury when we were in government which is exceptionally important not only to the tax revenue base for Australia but also the way that our tax system operates fairly for all Australians. While it is good to see that the government is taking up some of these measures, you would have to say that it has been late in coming. We are more than 12 months into this new government and it is work that was already done, work that had taken some time to develop. But it is good to see that the government is now bringing that forward.

Unfortunately, the government is not fully implementing these measures. As such, this is costing the budget over $1.1 billion over the forward estimates. That is a substantial amount of money. That is a huge loss to the Australian taxpayer and something that should not be lost. We think that the government has got this wrong. The government should be going further. There are no excuses not to follow through on the good work that was done by Labor when it was in government. Labor always welcomes genuine measures to improve transparency, but we should see things as they are in what is being put forward. Some of the measures being put forward here are a stunt, pure and simple. The timing of some of these things and what the government is doing are certainly part of a distraction from the government's very unfair budget. It is a budget that decreases the tax intake that you might have had in revenues if it had followed through fully on Labor's multinational international tax avoidance measures that we were putting in place. It also disadvantages lower and middle income Australians, particularly when it comes to superannuation and a range of other measures.

It has been said—and I have spoken on these matters many times—that the people that are hurt most by the government's budget are the lowest income workers, particularly women, who will not benefit from, for example, the low income superannuation contribution. This includes around 2.1 million working women in the country, all of whom are low income earners but would benefit the most. In this place, you often hear people talking about the ageing population and talking about how we have got to look forward and how we have got a look to the future so we can support more people to be independent in their retirement. Labor had those policies and measures in place. So it is not as if we are talking about something that was not done. It was something that was already there. But we see a government that has come in and has taken those measures away.

The other bill has four components to it: abolishing the mature age worker tax offset, abolishing the seafarer tax offset, reducing the R&D tax offset and updating the listing of deductible gift recipients. Some of these Labor will support, but there are some things that we think that, again, the government have got completely wrong and we will not be supporting them.

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