James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on the second reading of the Treasury Laws Amendment (2023 Law Improvement Package No. 1) Bill 2023. Like other speakers, I thank the ALRC for their work on this. I don't know that I agree with all the work they've been doing recently on some topics, but I agree with other speakers that this is an area of reform that does need a lot of attention to detail and persistence, and can be quite, if not extremely, dry at times. We appreciate the fact that a lot of hard work goes into bringing reform like this to the chamber. I thank them for their work on this and commend the other contributions in that regard.

I touch on what the lead speaker for the coalition pointed out, which is, firstly, that we support anything that is about deregulation and simplification for the business community. This body of work emanates from, initially, the Hayne royal commission and opportunities to look for red tape reduction and reforms that simplify without diminishing appropriate frameworks and protections that are in place, to ensure we have, in financial services in particular but more broadly, a framework that allows businesses to thrive but also ensures the appropriate rules and regulations are in place, to make sure we've got a corporate governance framework in this country that we can be proud of.

These bills also give us an opportunity to consider, with the rapid pace of technology and the ways in which doing business can change, ways in which statutes and legal frameworks need to take the opportunity to keep up to speed with that. During COVID, we made some fairly rapid changes to some of the older requirements in legislation, particularly about things like having physical meetings and documentation signing et cetera, for which we had and appreciated the support of the then opposition. Like a lot of things that we did in the urgency of COVID—telehealth being another great example—we were able to rapidly look at changes that ordinarily might have taken an excruciatingly long period of time. People were in a great mood to be open minded about ways to be innovative because of the challenges, particularly around social distancing, that were put in place.

I note that the Assistant Treasurer made the comment in his second reading speech on this bill that the amendments in schedule 4 'update certain provisions to reflect modern communication practices'. I really endorse reforms in this area, probably reforms more broad than what is happening in this bill, but I also reflect on the responsibility that needs to fall back on the companies that are given greater flexibility here. We have seen a lot of data breaches recently, one just in the last week or so which related to a vendor—as they sometimes call companies that provide these services, particularly in the United States—that was a supplier to a range of businesses and some prominent accounting firms in particular around electronic signing of documents. There has been a hack that, it seems, has seen the release of people's personal information through that third-party technology. We want to embrace and provide legislative flexibility for modern technology to be used in an ever greater way throughout all the requirements we have in society, particularly in business, where there are enormous red tape reduction opportunities and productivity gains to be seen around that. But there has got to be an emphasis put back, on the provision of those flexibilities, to make sure that there's a robust framework around things like the protection of data and these ongoing security breaches and hacking of people's information.

It's particularly concerning when it's things like somebody's private health records, financial information, credit card details, messages that might be sent on certain phone apps and all the rest of it. It seems that there are an ongoing and increasing number of reports and examples of the theft of consumer data. There are opportunities in the Corporations Act and with some of the work that the ALRC will be doing to put in place more stringent rules and regulations and requirements on businesses that hold personal information. One of the things that I think has become quite evident is the extent of information that is being kept on people but that it doesn't seem necessary whatsoever to keep—for example, records of former customers. We've had former customers of a particular business told, 'You used to be with us 10 years ago or 12 years ago, and we've just had a data hack, and all your information has been taken.' Why is it necessarily the case that that information is being kept, particularly kept in such a vulnerable state that it's being hacked and stolen by criminal entities? So we embrace those opportunities that the Assistant Treasurer mentioned but also look to make sure that we're putting those important obligations in place as we look for ways to modernise and provide productivity gains from that.

As the member for Bradfield mentioned and the member for Canberra responded to, we have also touched on the government's proposed superannuation changes, which are absolutely relevant to this debate and to discussion around the changes to corporations, particularly proposals of the new doubling of taxation of earnings on super balances over $3 million and, of course, the taxation on unrealised capital gains.

This is a very frightening and dramatic change to the fundamental principles that all corporations in this country operate under. It is very questionable, with what the Accounting Standards Board has to say about this principle and whether or not the government are looking to expand this principle beyond this thin end of a wedge that happens to be superannuation.

But, of course, the people of Australia should not be surprised. We knew that the government was going to come after super and dramatically change the tax treatments to superannuation. They were honest about it in the 2019 election but lost that election, so then they didn't tell anyone about it in the 2022 election so they wouldn't lose another election. Then, after winning the election, they suddenly, dramatically, had these great ideas around changing the superannuation taxation treatment that apparently didn't need to be told to the people of Australia before they went to the polls. There are a number of principles that are outrageous in that, both the misleading of voters and these retrospective changes to the provisions people have made for their retirement. A lot of people have contacted me. They had believed that they could count on the government not changing the taxation treatment of their superannuation. They had made decisions in the last couple of decades as to how they would structure their finances based on tax treatment. They did not expect the treatment to be changed in such a dramatic way.

The member for Canberra, in this debate, on the one hand said that this was only going to affect 0.5 per cent of those with superannuation and then conceded that Treasury modelling shows that one in 10 young people today will be affected by this. That's based on Treasury modelling. I wonder what the assumptions around inflation are in that Treasury modelling. A lot of modelling around inflation recently has been quite inaccurate, as far as the suggestion that the inflationary environment was going to be transitory. Regrettably, quite the opposite is occurring, and it's setting in quite deeply. One wonders, as this is remodelled—with 10 per cent of young people today eventually to be paying this higher rate of tax—what will happen if the future deterioration of the value of the dollar is greater than Treasury assumed in their modelling. We will wait to see.

As other coalition speakers have mentioned, we will support this bill. We would like to see a lot more reform in this area, and there are a lot more things this parliament could be taking action on than the important but limited elements of this bill. This week, we have a lot of government speakers on these couple of bills. It's almost 4.30 tomorrow afternoon. The government is almost there. We could be doing a lot of things with our time in the parliament to address some of the significant challenges that people have around the cost of living, rising mortgages, rising power prices, rising rents, deteriorating real wages. We see bills like this as important, but equally we can progress them through the parliament and perhaps use the parliament's time also to address some of those more significant issues. With those comments, I commend the bill to the House.

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