Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (COVID-19 Economic Response No. 2) Bill 2021 and I indicate upfront that I will be supporting this bill. The measures in this bill are in fact needed; I think everyone accepts that. The bill was provided to me in confidence on Monday, and I thank the government for getting it to my office early. It is often difficult, particularly for the crossbench, to deal with all the legislation approaching for the week. It was tabled in the House yesterday and it's being dealt with in the Senate today. It has not followed the normal process because it's urgently needed to assist those in lockdown in Sydney. It's interesting that the explanatory memorandum, when I was looking through it, had a line that shocked me when I saw it. Page 3 of the explanatory memorandum says:

Compliance cost impact: An exemption from Regulation Impact Statement requirements was granted by the Prime Minister as there were urgent and unforeseen circumstances.

I find that actually quite unbelievable. This is the sort of text you might think would win some literary award because it certainly is fiction. I accept the need is urgent as there are people in Sydney who need help. I don't accept that the bill needs to be urgent because this was foreseen. There must have been advice to the effect that we would need further assistance as we had to deal with various strains of the pandemic. If there was advice that said something different, we need to really look long and hard at this advice. But the problem is we can't see any of it.

We can't see any advice because any advice that's related to the health of Australians during this pandemic is sprinkled with national cabinet secrecy dust, completely unnecessarily. I'm pleased to inform the chamber that tomorrow, at 2:45 pm New South Wales time, Justice White will hand down his decision in my matters challenging whether the national cabinet is a cabinet, so I'm waiting to see what happens there. I think that will be interesting because hopefully that will open up the information that flows through to parliamentarians, to experts, to professionals in the medical field and to the public, so that they can critique the advice and analyse the advice for themselves. I'm hopeful that I'll get an outcome that will support that future course. This is the problem. Transparency is a good thing. When transparency exists, people are required to perform at their absolute best. And it's in the absence of transparency that we see all sorts of things go wrong, as has happened in this pandemic, as has happened in relation to quarantine, as has happened in relation to the vaccine rollout.

This morning I revealed the fact that the COVID vaccine certificate, which I received just last week as I got my second AstraZeneca jab, is easily forged. As we were developing a vaccine that almost certainly—in fact, inevitably—will be connected to health measures, that's something that should have been thought about. I'm pleased to say I have talked to Minister Reynolds and opened a dialogue. I do appreciate you, Minister Reynolds, allowing me to approach you on that. But again, if we'd seen what was happening behind the scenes, some of these comments could have been made a little bit earlier, and perhaps we could have had better outcomes, or outcomes that worked a bit sooner, and, indeed, we wouldn't have to waste money by repeating things.

That leads me to the amendment that I am going to move during the committee stage. This is an amendment that focuses on transparency. It was mentioned by Senator McKim in his speech in the second reading debate. I'll give you a bit of history around this amendment. My amendment seeks to provide transparency in relation to large companies that get public funding throughout this pandemic, and that goes back through JobKeeper.

I'll just explain to you what happened in New Zealand in relation to their wage subsidy program. New Zealand spent approximately $12 billion on COVID-19 direct wage subsidies, and they received $637 million back from companies who said, 'Look, we thought we might have needed it, but actually we didn't.' Five and a half per cent of what was paid out was actually returned. Here in Australia we've spent approximately $89 billion, close to $90 billion, in COVID-19 direct wage subsidies, and we've only received $225 million back. That's 0.25 per cent in repayments.

The difference between Australia and New Zealand is not in any strict legislative regime that attempts to minimise corruption or fraud; New Zealand also approached it with the view 'Let's help first.' But what they have done is publish on a website—it's very easy to find, and I encourage senators to go and do this—the names of employers who receive a subsidy payment and how much they get paid. If they fully repay the money, they're taken off the list. If they partially repay some money, that is reduced from the amount that is shown of the total subsidy they received. It's not name and shame. It's about saying that, if a company is in receipt of public funding, there's a reasonable expectation from the public's side that that's information that ought to be known. It's not private company information per se, because it's about the amount of money—taxpayers' money—given to the company. We understand that many of these companies needed that money. Many companies may well need money that is being delivered under this particular program, under this particular bill. In New Zealand they have quite successfully managed to get greater returns from people who didn't require the money, just by being transparent and letting people see where taxpayers' money went.

That is, in effect, what my amendment seeks to do. My amendment seeks, as a starting point, simply to have the names of larger companies who received JobKeeper published on an ATO website that has the name of the entity, the number of individuals for whom the entity received a JobKeeper payment, each period for which the entity received a JobKeeper payment, the total amount of JobKeeper received by the entity and whether or not they've voluntarily paid back any money. It's pretty simple. It's not intrusive. It's a transparency measure that's designed, in the case of JobKeeper, to have companies look and say: 'You know what, it's now out there publicly that we received this money. Can we properly justify it?' They may answer, 'No, so maybe we should pay it back,' or, 'Yes, we can justify that and we thank you very much, taxpayer.'

That's the aim of my amendment. It doesn't seek to do it, however, just in relation to JobKeeper; it also seeks to do it, moving forward, for any payments made to larger companies, to enable the public to see what is being spent with whom. This new bill will encourage a system of honesty and integrity that makes sure that taxpayers' money is actually spent properly and in accordance with the intended aim of the payments. I'll speak briefly of this again during the committee stage. I encourage senators to support my amendment.