Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

But I would say to you, sir, that it is not just boats that Labor is dead on; it is dead on tax policy and it is dead in this parliament. Exhibit A is this bill, mate. You introduce a complicated taxation bill last week, no community consultation, no committee consultation, and ram it through the parliament, all because you are trying to get to a surplus that was never going to happen under Labor. And now you are introducing provisions that are going to have a huge impact in the community, but you do not want to speak to anyone about them!

I would say to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the total measures in this bill bring forward more than $10 billion worth of tax receipts—$10 billion. And it has been all about a surplus that Labor will never deliver. What a surprise! Even with all these measures in this chaotic taxation policy, the debt keeps growing. As we found out yesterday, the debt limit is going to have to be increased again. The Treasurer does not have any courage; he is a weak man. He does not have the courage to come into this place and ask for an increase in the credit card limit of the Commonwealth. And why? Because he has done it on four previous occasions and he does not want to have to do it on the fifth. He will leave it to whoever is there on 15 September. As he said to Neil Mitchell, 'It will be someone else's problem'. He does not even think that he will be there; it will be someone else's problem.

Do you know whose problem it is going to be? It will be that lady's, up there in the gallery. It is going to be your problem. And the gentleman next to you, and the gentleman to him. All of you—it will be your problem. Because there will be a mess left by this government again that someone has to clean up.

Schedule 2 of the bill makes various amendments to tax laws and the Infrastructure Australia Act to introduce a tax loss incentive for infrastructure projects identified by the Infrastructure Coordinator. Now, the government claims that this measure will encourage private sector investment in nationally significant infrastructure such as roads, rail and ports. I want to see that too. We want to encourage private sector investment in infrastructure. This is hugely important. Governments—state, federal, Liberal or Labor, whatever the case—do not have the money available for massive up-front investment in infrastructure, so we have to find ways to encourage that vast pool of money, particularly of superannuation, to go into infrastructure.

The changes within this schedule allow entities such as corporates and trusts that are carried on exclusively for the purposes of what is called a DIP—a designated infrastructure project—to uplift tax losses by the long-term government bond rate and carry forward tax losses, as well as plain bad debt deductions, even though that does not satisfy the continuity of ownership and same business test for companies and equivalent tests for trusts.

It is an enormous amount of power in the hands of the Infrastructure Coordinator. We would have liked to get more information about this in the committee process, but, again, we can only deal with what we have before us. I would like to know what the possible unintended consequences of this provision are, but we are not going to get any answers.

Schedule 3 and schedule 4 of this bill deal with the Tax Agent Services Act 2009. I stated from the outset that the coalition has a number of concerns in relation to schedules 3 and 4. We are going to move amendments to excise these two schedules from the bill. The Tax Agent Services Act was introduced in order to provide a national regulatory regime for tax agents and BAS agents:

… to ensure that providers of tax agent services to the public meet appropriate professional and ethical standards.

Now, the Tax Agent Services Act seeks to address the fine line between whether an entity is merely providing general information about the tax implications of particular products or giving tax advice that can be reasonably expected to be relied on, and therefore a taxation service.

The government took the decision to carve out the tax agent services provided by financial services licensees, and this carve-out is due to expire on 30 June 2013. So, with less than four weeks to go before its proposed implementation, schedule 3 of this bill seeks to create a completely new regulatory regime for financial services industry entities that give tax advice. So with less than four weeks to go—just think about this—anyone in the financial services industry who gives tax advice under the act is going to have a completely new regulatory regime start, and here is the legislation.

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