Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just before the suspension, I was referring to the increase of the wine equalisation tax producer rebate cap from $350,000 to $400,000 and how that will provide some relief to the wine industry across Australia, which is on its knees at the moment. I was making the point that the wine industry is struggling right now because of decisions and policies taken by the coalition government under Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the time. In turn, that ended up with China closing its doors to Australian wine for three years in which there was almost no wine being sold to our previously largest importer of Australian wines.

Whilst the producer rebate cap being lifted to $400,000 is important and will provide some assistance, of course it won't go far enough to help those wine producers and the grape growers who are indeed struggling and right now having to pull out their vines. Just to do that, I understand, costs them around $7,000 a hectare, and then to replant with something else might add another $30,000 a hectare. So you can appreciate the financial burden it places on them. Of course they would be welcoming some additional government support in respect to that, particularly because they find themselves in the position they do because of a previous government's approach. And so I have a great deal of sympathy for those wine growers.

The last matter that I will touch on is schedule 4 of this legislation, which talks about the convention that was agreed to between Australia and Portugal—a tax convention that was signed in November 2023, just over two years ago. There are two aspects to this that I think are critical. For one, in the global environment we live in, I think it's important to have tax laws that can be as simple as possible to use between two different countries, because that in turn makes the flow of free trade so much easier and allows businesses, whether they're in Portugal or here in Australia, to do business without having to have complicated tax arrangements in place. But the more significant issue of that convention is that it also helps with trying to control the tax evasion that takes place across the world every day by multinationals who use different countries in order to set up their management arrangements for this very specific purpose of evading tax. We know that that's been the case for years and we know that, under both coalition and Labor governments, there have been attempts to try and reduce or prevent that in different ways. But it's not very easy when you are dealing with entities that operate from different countries and when those countries are not prepared to comply with an arrangement whereby people are required to pay their fair share of tax. It's not good for either country, so to have the tax convention signed between Portugal and Australia is something I dearly welcome. Because whilst it won't stop these entities from operating the same kinds of schemes in other countries, at least it's another country that has added its name to the list of global countries that are out there trying to minimise tax evasion by multinationals, which runs into the trillions of dollars every year.

I know that it would make a huge difference to the budget here in Australia if those companies and those entities paid their full range of tax that they should be paying but which they are able to evade because they list their management centres in countries that are of low tax jurisdictions. So with those comments, I commend this legislation. It's another example of how Labor is committed to the superannuation scheme that was introduced back in 1982 and how we continuously ensure that it meets the requirements of today's people.

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