Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

It may assist this particular aspect of the debate to refer to the Bills Digest No. 105 with respect to this bill. On its penultimate page, in the subsection entitled ‘Amendment to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Act 1986’, it refers to item 62 in that paragraph and then follows it with:

Note that the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007 introduced on 15 February 2007 amends the secrecy and disclosure provisions in the Taxation Administration Act 1953 to allow the Commissioner of Taxation to make disclosures of taxpayer information to Project Wickenby taskforce officers and to officers in other taskforces that may be prescribed in the regulations. Project Wickenby is a multi-agency taskforce—

and the minister will be able to confirm whether AUSTRAC is on that task force—

addressing alleged tax avoidance and evasion involving the use of offshore entities, which may also entail other features such as large-scale money-laundering, fraud, or breaches of the law relating to the regulation of financial markets or corporations.

Now, self-evidently, the Parliamentary Library is not an agency of the government; it is an agency of the parliament and its views are not those of the government, but it clearly has the view that AUSTRAC has a part to play, not only in the prevention of the commission of money-laundering crimes but in following up crimes which have already been committed. I must say very clearly that I have absolutely no objection to AUSTRAC information being used in that way. I think it is perfectly proper and, in fact, highly desirable. I will support Project Wickenby facilities being enlarged to maximise the prosecution of anyone who has been engaged in money laundering for criminal or tax avoidance purposes.

I will repeat that my understanding of the minister’s earlier response is that the chief executive officer of AUSTRAC may, on application, allow appropriate information in appropriate circumstances to be distributed via a foreign government to a multilateral agency, which I would assume for internal investigations would be something like the Project Wickenby task force, or externally might include agencies such as Interpol.