Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

With the greatest respect, trademarks are branding. Labor governments removed branding from tobacco, creating a pathway for organised crime to thrive. The Labor Party talks about this all the time. It's part of customs legislation. It's entirely reasonable and, if the chair wants to challenge me on that, we can do so. When you have trademarks, it creates differentiation between products. This is about false trademark infringement. When you have trademarks, it creates differentiation between products so that consumers can make decisions based on different ways products are branded. That's the nature of a trademark. As a consequence, when you strip trademarks from products, as previous Labor governments have explicitly done by law and then patted themselves on the back and thrown parties to themselves—the former minister Nicola Roxon said she was the world first—you create a generic product. A consequence of creating that generic product, plus a substantial increase in the excise, is that it has led to the greatest windfall for organised crime, because the government doesn't understand customs regulation, customs legislation, trademark law, the practice of trademarks, trademark infringement, tax law and the intersection that leads to the profiting of organised crime.

As the previous speaker spoke about organised crime, I will speak about organised crime in the context of trademarks, because one of the problems that we have is we have a government that doesn't understand how trademarks practically work. The consequence of failing to understand the importance of intellectual property, the role it plays, what happens when you strip it from products, is it creates an environment where you have a low actual production value good sold at a disproportionate premium. When that happens, as happens with illicit products which have false trademarks, organised crime steps into the breach and profits from it, as the previous Labor speaker referred. What happens? They build the distribution networks to do so. Through the process of building those distribution networks, organised crime has never had a better time than under the Albanese government explicitly because of false trademarks or the government removing trademarks and then increasing excise on certain products.

So when the previous speaker spoke about how I didn't understand how these things practically work, I can assure you I have a very clear understanding about how these things work and about the consequences of poor government legislation and the flow-on effects. We have seen, because of the approach of the Albanese government deliberately stripping trademarks, particularly in the area of things like tobacco, violent bombing of small businesses, dramatic increases in small-business insurance, significant profiteering for organised crime that then goes on to do things like finance terrorism, particularly antisemitic terrorism, including with a country that, last I checked, was currently being bombed by the United States because of its exporting of terrorism and the threat of nuclear weapons. So it highlights how important (1) having a conversation about this legislation is and (2) what happens when bad Labor governments successively get this area of law wrong.

But as I made the point, when bad Labor governments get the law wrong, it enables an environment for organised crime to profiteer. When that happens under the protection of false or legitimate trademarks, as has occurred—according to former minister Bill Shorten—organised crime moves into government funded distribution networks through the NDIS, which is a brand to help people understand what it is trying to achieve but, in practice, has become a honeypot for organised crime.

The key thing we have to do is stop organised crime, and one of the most important ways to do that is to actually respect the private property of trademark holders, and that is what Labor governments have a terrible track record of doing. In fact, they have an explicit history of stripping trademarks from products, and they were explicitly warned by industry at the time that this will lead to a proliferation of organised crime and profiteering that will subvert tax revenue and Australian law—explicitly warned by industry, explicitly warned by trademark experts, explicitly warned by law and order professionals. And, of course, where are those products coming from? They are coming through Australian ports in containers, and we are not seeing tax being paid. Consumers are buying these products unbranded, knowingly or unknowingly.

So the government doesn't understand what it is doing. It doesn't understand our trademark law; it doesn't understand legislatively. And, as sure as hell, the previous speaker has no idea; this was clear from in his interjections and points of relevance. This is a reflection of what happens when a government simply doesn't understand what it's doing.

Sitting suspended from 12:00 to 12:06

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