Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Did you want to speak on this? If you do, that is excellent—one never knows whether a coalition speaker is going to turn up in these debates. I would like to see them in this chamber. I would like to see them having more than one member from that side engaging in these important debates on multinational profit shifting. These are the debates that ought to be bipartisan, because no-one in this House should stand for an extra tax loophole; no-one in this House should support giving a billion dollars back to multinationals while cutting the wages of the cleaners who clean our officers. They are the wrong priorities for Australia—that is not just against Labor values; it is against Australia's fundamental egalitarian values. With these sorts of McEwenist arguments against reform, it feels to me as though we are engaging in that old tariff debate all over again in which we have members walking in here supporting loopholes which, in the end, might be good for a few sharp-witted accountants but end up being bad for the budget bottom line.

Inequality has been growing steadily for the past generation—it did not rise over the last six years of Labor in government; from 2007 to 2013 inequality did not rise. But it is significantly higher than it was in the 1970s. To give just one statistic, the top one per cent has doubled its income share; the top 0.1 per cent tripled its income share. If you are in the bottom tenth of the wage distribution, your real earnings grew $7,000 over the last generation, but if you are in the top tenth your real earnings grew $47,000—more than three times the wage growth at the top of the distribution that we see at the bottom of the distribution.

So now is the very last time that we need a government to be giving money away to firms with multibillion-dollar profits while taking money away from pensioners, from those who are sick and by forcing the unemployed to spend six months without benefits, perhaps sleeping in a car, if they are unable to find a job. Australia's egalitarian values demand that we have a smarter approach on multinational profit shifting. The member opposite pointed out that the government is not proceeding with a targeted anti-avoidance provision. That is a provision the government promised it would put in place. They said they would not proceed with our repeal of 25-90 and they promised at the end of 2013 a targeted anti-avoidance provision. A year later, they broke that promise—like so many other promises that have been broken since this government came to office.

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