Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Republic) Share this | Hansard source

I am being entirely relevant to this bill, because it's been identified by a number of submitters to the Senate inquiry into this that the issue of integrity is an important one and that this bill will undermine the operation of integrity when it comes to transparency and accountability for shareholders. I'm simply making the point that, when it comes to integrity, this government has poor form—most notably in the fact that it's been promising a National Integrity Commission for well over three years now, and what have we got? Nothing. It's yet to present anything to this parliament.

One of the arguments that this government makes in respect of the undermining of the continuous disclosure obligations is the issue around insurance. It's their belief that if these laws are passed there will be insurance savings for companies throughout Australia. They often point—and the member for Goldstein pointed to this—to the notion of class actions. The evidence points to the fact that, again, this is another example of the coalition astroturfing, making something up when it's simply not an issue, because less than one per cent of actions in the Federal Court are shareholder class actions. It is well under one per cent. That means that well over 99 per cent of actions in the Federal Court don't relate to this issue. So how can it be said that there's a problem if it's less than one per cent?

The other point is that this notion that there will be savings in insurance that come from this bill was completely blown out of the park by none other than the Insurance Council of Australia when they presented their evidence to the Senate committee. They said that, in a best-case scenario, this would result in little or no changes to the price of directors and officers insurance. In short, in the short to medium term, at best there will be little or no change to D&O premiums. That's the view of the Insurance Council, the representatives of insurers: that this would make very little difference to that issue of savings around insurance. So that issue is again blown out of the water and is another example of this government astroturfing and trying to make up things that are simply not there.

But we all know that the government backbenchers have been agitating for these changes for some time. Australian shareholders benefit from these strong continuous disclosure laws, and all Australian shareholders will be harmed if these changes get through. The rules don't just protect retail shareholders; they make Australian businesses stronger and more attractive to investors. These changes would put the interests of a small number of company directors above the interests of mum and dad investors, self-funded retirees and large institutional investors. And that's why there is this strong opposition to the change from the Australian Shareholders Association, from certain law firms and from the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors. And it's a matter of public record that ASIC and the ACCC have advised the government that the pre-COVID continuous disclosure and misleading and deceptive conduct provisions should be retained. ASIC, for example, told Treasury that the pre-COVID continuous disclosure laws are a fundamental tenet of our markets and are particularly important during times of market uncertainty and volatility.

So all of the arguments that the government has raised in respect of this bill have been shot down by people who've made submissions to the Senate inquiry into this bill, but most importantly they've been shot down by the representatives of shareholders. That is the representatives of mum and dad shareholders and of self-managed super funds. They're the people that we should be thinking about when we're discussing these laws.

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