Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to support the Treasury Laws Amendment (Making Multinationals Pay Their Fair Share—Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2023. There are many attributes that aptly describe the Australian way, and one of those is the sense of fairness. We are an egalitarian society. We believe that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. Surveys have found that more than 90 per cent of Australians believe a fair go is important.

The term 'fair go' is one of the most pervasive and enduring expressions in Australian cultural and political discourse. Academics suggest the expression first emerged around the 1860s and has evolved, as we have as a nation, to embody the values that we all hold dear. But what exactly is a fair go? While its uses are many and varied and dependent on circumstance and context, the Cambridge dictionary defines and describes the exclamation as something you say when you want someone to act in a reasonable way. It is in this context that I refer to this bill that's before us. This bill seeks to simply direct companies to act in a reasonable way, because many have not and continue to behave in a way that is not reasonable. So, in good Australian vernacular, I say to all those multinational companies that are not paying their fair share of tax: fair go!

Some of the biggest multinational companies do not pay any tax in Australia—zero tax! Vodafone, with an income of around $3 billion, paid zero tax. IKEA, with a total income of around $1 billion, paid zero tax. Facebook, with an income of $528 million, paid only 2.6 per cent tax. As many as 80 companies have paid zero tax in Australia for six years straight. There is something fundamentally wrong when a teacher, a police officer or an ambulance officer is paying a higher marginal tax rate than these companies. That is fundamentally wrong.

In November 2022, the Australian Tax Office released its annual tax transparency report. The report revealed that, of the 2,468 large and medium corporate entities, 782—32 per cent or a third—paid no tax at all in the financial year, down from a high of 36 per cent in the 2015-16 financial year. The report also reveals that Australia has some of the world's highest levels of tax compliance. Large businesses had a tax compliance rate of 93 per cent for tax paid voluntarily. After compliance activities by the ATO, this figure rose to 96 per cent.

This tells us that companies are mostly complying with our laws. It also tells us that our laws are woefully inadequate, and national companies know this and actively exploit it. Companies use various schemes to avoid paying taxes through debt shifting, registering intangible assets such as copyright or trademarks in tax, known as 'strategic transfer pricing' and debt shifting. This isn't just a problem in Australia; it is an unfortunate defining feature of a global financial system. It is estimated that, in 2019, close to US$1 trillion in profits earned were shifted from home countries to tax havens or countries with very low tax rates.

Every dollar of foregone tax is $1 that we don't have to provide for services to Australians. We have crises in aged care, health, cost of living, energy prices and poverty. I could go on. If companies paid their fair share of tax, we could go part way to fixing some of the systemic problems facing our nation. Requiring companies to disclose information about their subsidiaries and annual financial reports and aligning our laws with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by addressing the use of interest debts for base erosion and profit-shifting purposes, as proposed here, is appropriate and welcomed. I support this bill, and I look forward to multinational companies finally being bound by laws that give a fair go to all.

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