Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, it was a lie then and it's a lie now because you actually can't water down something that doesn't exist. That's a pretty straightforward proposition. That's pretty obvious. You can't mount a reasonable argument against the proposition that you can't water down something that doesn't exist.

To sum up, there were tax transparency requirements, then there weren't and then the Greens ensured the tax transparency requirements were brought back. We got what we could out of Prime Minister Turnbull, and we improved tax transparency arrangements as a result. It's just that the Labor Party didn't like the Greens not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, so they told this big fat lie and they repeated it.

Now the Liberal and National parties are out of government—and what a massive sigh of relief, I am sure, many people in Australia heaved when that result became known and was confirmed. With them gone, we are now putting forward amendments, which are on sheet 1596, to restore tax transparency thresholds for Australian private companies to levels that were in place before the Liberal-National coalition repealed them and, importantly, to levels that Labor supported at the 2006 and 2019 elections. I will note that, curiously, Labor did not take that policy to the election that has just been held. I've no idea why. Perhaps someone from the new government might like to address that question in a future contribution on this legislation.

So I do want to be clear about what happened—and I've been clear about what happened—because there has been a lot of misinformation out there, spread by the Labor Party, about what happened, and it's important that folks understand the historical record here. We had tax transparency requirements, then we didn't and then the Greens ensured they were brought back. We didn't water down anything, because you cannot water down something that does not exist.

Very briefly, on our amendment (2), during our debate surrounding corporate tax transparency, the issue of the 1,500 or so private companies who were exempted from filing financial statements with ASIC gained prominence. Basically, at the point at which the Keating government introduced public financial reporting requirements for private companies, a political fix was organised that meant that some of the biggest and oldest private companies were given a free pass.

I'll just pause there to observe that so much of what's wrong with neoliberalism is about the inside track that political donors get and that corporate mates get. That's because we have a system of institutionalised bribery in this country, where companies—and, in many cases, some of the biggest corporations in this country—bribe major political parties to get policy outcomes. That's why, for example, about one-third of the top-100-earning companies in this country pay absolutely no tax whatsoever. It's why the robber barons who run the big gas corporations are laughing all the way to the bank as they pocket their multimillion-dollar CEO bonuses—these corporate psychopaths who are cooking the planet. It's why they get away with that stuff: because they bribe the major political parties in this place. It's why the planet is cooking; it's why it we're in the sixth mass extinction event in the history of this little ball of rock that circles the sun; and it's why people are being reduced to economic units. The pandemic has ripped away the facade and exposed for all to see that, ultimately, people are units in an economy rather than human beings. That's how neoliberalism views them. Part of the reason that the major parties are so beholden to neoliberalism as a philosophical and economic construct is because they bribe the major parties.

Interestingly, I reckon that when they look at their ROIs—their returns on investment—in those corporate boardrooms, right up at the top, with the highest ROI that they achieve on anything, are their political donations. It's the best return on a dollar they ever got, because for every dollar they throw into the coffers of the Labor and Liberal parties they're making multi-tens of millions—hundreds of millions—and, in some cases, billions of dollars in return. And those corporate psychopaths don't care that their actions are cooking the planet. They don't care that there's a chance that billions of people will die this century—mostly brown or black skinned people, and poor people, I might add—because they'll be right. They'll have their little retreats on little islands in temperate parts of the world. They'll be able to buy ongoing survival for them and their kids for a little bit longer than the rest of the world, because they've grown obscenely rich by cooking the planet. That's the story they tell themselves at night and the story they tell themselves in their corporate boardrooms: these are some of the best returns on investment they get from the institutional bribery of political donations.

Back when the Keating government introduced public financial reporting requirements, the political fix was organised and that meant that some of the biggest and oldest private companies were given a free pass. And it's worth placing on the record that since the debate around corporate tax transparency has been up and running the Senate has voted to repeal this exemption on numerous occasions. Finally, now, we've got Labor with the numbers in the other place—in the House of Representatives. So we urge the Labor Party to support our amendments. They deliver a greater level of corporate tax transparency and they're in line with the way that the Labor Party has repeatedly voted on many occasions in this Senate. We in the Greens believe that this is an opportunity for this new parliament, with the balance of power in the Senate and where Labor plus the Greens, plus one other vote, can deliver legislation that, in this case, will improve transparency around corporate tax arrangements. And with Labor with a majority in the house of assembly—sorry, House of Representatives; I was going back to my old days in the Tasmanian parliament there, I'm sorry about that!—we can make these things a reality. Remember: corporate tax transparency is critical for applying political pressure to make sure the big corporations pay their fair share of tax so we can invest that revenue in things like dental health into Medicare, mental health into Medicare and making child care free, making people's lives better.

I move the second reading amendment standing in my name:

At the end of the motion, add

", but the Senate:

  (a) notes that:

     (i) the stage three tax cuts will make Australia's personal income tax system significantly less progressive,

     (ii) the benefits of the stage three tax cuts will flow overwhelmingly to high income earners and to men, and

     (iii) given the stage three tax cuts are not due to come into effect until 2024-25, the repeal of these tax cuts would not cause significant uncertainty, and

  (b) calls on the Government to introduce legislation to repeal the stage three tax cuts".

I flag that in the committee stage I'll be moving amendments.