Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a tax cut that will benefit, primarily, foreign multinationals and their shareholders. Up to 60 per cent of the company tax cuts will go to foreign shareholders, and of course a company could take the tax cut and have more share buy-backs instead of giving their employees a wage rise. It is absolutely appropriate that companies act in their best interests. Under the Corporations Law, we refer to companies as 'corporate citizens' or as 'persons'—artificial persons. In that regard, they have their own stakeholders and their own shareholders and, not surprisingly, they like to address those people and to give them the benefit of investing in those companies.

But that's not the problem. That's actually not what these tax cuts are going to do. These tax cuts will benefit companies in a way that is unfair. Senator Colbeck just asked: 'What is fairness?' Fairness is about treating people equally. So maybe this is a wing-and-a-prayer sort of operation that the government is running and it actually has no policy development around looking at what companies will actually do.

Let's have a look at some of the behaviour—perhaps lawful, but certainly unethical—that has gone on and been highlighted in the last few months. Let's look at Glencore, which, instead of negotiating with its employees, decided that it would just lock them out. We welcome foreign companies investing here. But in Australia we do not seek to break employees' will by locking them out of their workplace rather than negotiating with them. It is abhorrent behaviour. Let's have a look at the economics committee's inquiry into corporate tax avoidance. ExxonMobil, a couple of weeks ago in Melbourne, gave evidence to that inquiry that not only have they not paid any tax for the last three years; they won't be paying any tax for the next few years. They couldn't actually give a date for when they thought they might be paying some tax. I say that this is unethical behaviour.

Is it really the government's hope that these companies are going to say, 'Oh, look: we've got a corporate tax cut, so we're going to go down a few per cent in the tax we pay, and what we're going to do with that is to give our employees some extra wages'? Aren't these companies actually going to go back to their stakeholders and shareholders and say: 'We're going to give you an increased dividend'? They're not going to pay out on the cost of their business; they're going to pay out on what they can give to their shareholders. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with that. That's actually what companies should do. This government is pinning its hope on people behaving well, but there are the examples of Glencore and ExxonMobil, and, in fact, there are whole lists of companies that do not behave ethically and do not pay tax in this country.

This is unaffordable and it will burden Australian taxpayers. If you go to the federal debt calculator you'll see that, as of today, the federal government debt is $552 billion. It has doubled under this government. This government would have you believe that they are good economic managers. They are not. And they are suffering from the fact that they have had two weak treasurers, Mr Hockey and now the current Treasurer. No wonder Senator Cormann is leaving the chamber. He has many things to do, because he, apparently, is—