Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by Senator Milne today relating to taxation policy and the Australian Taxation Office.

I want to go into the issue of Who pays for our common wealth? That is a title of a new report by the Tax Justice Network and United Voice. It found that, of Australia's largest 200 companies, 29 per cent had an effective tax rate of 10 per cent or less and 14 per cent had an effective tax rate of zero per cent. And so we have revealed the true identity of the Treasurer's, Mr Hockey's, leaners. Remember all the talk about leaners and lifters? The inference from the government has been that the leaners are the poor, the unemployed, the people with disabilities and young people—they should all pay more because clearly they are the leaners. Yet, we find that the real leaners in Australian society are the multinational corporations who operate here and Australian companies operating here that are avoiding tax by taking their affairs offshore through subsidiaries and hiding in tax havens. They are the leaners and they are the ones that the government should be going after in order to improve Australia's revenue stream, not trying to go even harder on people who have so little.

That is clearly what has come out of the report. That is why I have been asking Senator Cormann these questions, and it is disgraceful that he is refusing to answer them. First of all, 3,000 people have been sacked from the Australian Taxation Office, and these are the very people who should be working to get this money back from the tax avoiders—particularly those who have been involved in transfer pricing. Since they have been sacked or given a redundancy, they have gone across to some of the big accounting firms that employ them to help the big companies minimise or avoid their tax. We now have this ridiculous situation, and the minister refused to answer a question about this yesterday, where the tax office is outsourcing the tax audits of corporations to the big accounting firms that are also employed to minimise the tax of the very same corporations. If that is not a conflict of interest that has been set up by government, I do not know what is.

We have a ridiculous situation where the biggest tax avoiders in Australia start of course with Murdoch's 21st Century Fox, which is paying one per cent tax. But the top corporate tax avoiders are Singapore Telecommunications, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Westfield, QBE, ANZ and GPT Group. These are the people who lecture the community about why they should not have to pay a carbon price and why they should not have to pay the appropriate tax in Australia while supporting the government to go after co-payments for going to the doctor, while telling the unemployed they have to live for six months on nothing and while telling single parents that they cannot be supported. It is utterly disgraceful. The minister is not going to get away with it and neither is the Treasurer. He is going to the G20 and saying that, whilst 36 other countries have been early adopters of information sharing to get around and avoid and deal with the tax havens, Australia has asked for a delay of another year so that business can adjust to the fact that the world is finally getting serious about sharing information so as to deal with these tax havens and tax evaders.

Today I asked the minister whether he would require Australian corporations to disclose all foreign subsidiaries in their financial statements, and he did not answer the question. I also asked him about the conflict of interest with the tax office's experienced staff having gone to these accounting firms and whether he thought that posed a risk to Commonwealth revenue, and he said 'no'. Today he also said that there were enough staff and there was enough technology to do the job properly. If that is the case, why is it not happening? Why aren't the tax avoiders being taken to court? Why aren't they being faced with court and with jail? They always get out of it by settling with a lack of transparency. No-one ever knows what the deal was with the tax office whereby they got away without paying their full share of tax. We need a new and vigorous effort by the tax office to take them to court, and if we need better legislation to do it, then we stand here ready to get behind it.

Finally, I want to say that the leaners in Australia are the wealthiest corporations, and the lifters are the rest of the community, who are trying to manage without it.

Question agreed to.