Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I won't keep the House, or the member for Bennelong, very long; I just want to make a few remarks. The Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 6) Bill is an important bill, and I endorse the remarks of previous Labor speakers. Especially important is schedule 5, an amendment to the Taxation Administration Act and the Family Law Act to provide a new mechanism to share superannuation info in family law proceedings. As we've been hearing from all speakers, including government speakers, that was a measure the government committed to in 2018. It's an urgent measure, yet it's taken the government three long years to get around to legislating it, again evidencing their lack of real commitment and urgency to advancing issues that affect women. It's welcome that it's in this bill and it needs to get through quickly.

I want to make a couple of procedural remarks. Two of these schedules in this bill were previously introduced in the Treasury Laws Amendment (2020 Measures No. 4) Bill. When that bill left this House and went to the Senate, Labor supported amendments regarding the grandfathering of arrangements for certain large private companies in relation to tax transparency. For seven or eight years now the government has been trying to hide the tax affairs of large private companies. Labor's got a pro-transparency, pro-disclosure approach, so we supported successful amendments regarding this. The government, of course, wanting to protect these large private companies and keep their tax affairs secret, refused to progress the bill. Some of those schedules are back here, in this bill, but now with something more urgent, which is schedule 5, which will be of benefit and is of import to women. There's the risk, when the bill leaves this House with everyone's support, that the same thing will happen again. There's also the risk that senators, in particular, Green senators, may pull a little parliamentary stunt, which they've been doing, and tack on another amendment relating to JobKeeper transparency. So I want to send a message to the Senate: don't play games with this bill.

This bill contains an important measure, schedule 5, that would allow people, usually women, going through divorce proceedings to get proper information about their spouse's superannuation to allow for a fair division of property and to stop tying up the court's time. It's an urgent measure. The government should have done it three years ago, but it's finally getting around to it. Labor supports tax transparency, but this is not the bill for independent senators and particularly the Greens stunt party in the Senate to play parliamentary games with. Labor has moved amendments to require the publication of names of every firm who received JobKeeper where they had an over $10 million turnover. That's our position. Wherever we can we move those amendments, and I commend the member for Fenner, sitting right there, for his work to expose the government's rorts and waste—billions of dollars of JobKeeper paid to profitable companies. The Australian taxpayer should see that list. In the US and the UK, with similar schemes, their taxpayers know which companies got that public support. But the question is: How do we best achieve that? How do we force the government to do that? I say again to the Senate: be careful not to delay urgent bills with juvenile parliamentary tactics.

We saw this recently with another bill with the Greens and the crossbench in the Senate. They moved an amendment supporting disclosure of JobKeeper, the policy I just outlined, but they moved it on an urgent bill which was providing money to support people in lockdown. In the Senate, Labor supported the amendment for transparency in JobKeeper payments, but when it got back to the House the government wouldn't support it. We were not going to block that bill and fall into a silly parliamentary trap that the Greens and the crossbench thought they were setting for us. If we'd agreed with what the Greens and the crossbench were doing, there would have been businesses and individuals across the country in lockdown with no economic support. It's a silly game to wedge Labor, and the whole point of it really is to spread rubbish on social media trying to pretend that Labor doesn't support tax transparency. Twitter lights up. Facebook lights up. The juvenile Greens go home thinking they've had a good day out at the parliament and they've achieved something.

We need to be really clear: there are urgent bills and there are not urgent bills. Supporting women to get proper information about their spouse's superannuation when they're going through divorce is urgent. It was urgent three years ago; it's more urgent now. Supporting businesses and people doing it tough in lockdown to get money in their pockets and economic support, that's urgent. It was urgent last week and it had to get through. This is not the bill for more silly Greens' stunts. Where Labor sees an opportunity, we'll move amendments for tax transparency. We'll move amendments to force the government to put out lists in public of which companies with a turnover of over $10 million got JobKeeper. We'll do that, we did it last week on another bill and we'll continue to do that, but this is not the bill for parliamentary games. This place is not student politics or whatever sandpit the Greens like to think they're playing in. It's not to create memes to wedge Labor and get people all angry on social media. This is the parliament. This is a serious bill. It needs to go through this House and go through the Senate unamended. Thank you.

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