Address to Parliament - BILLS - Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Accountability and Fairness) Bill 2023

The member for Morton talks about good, sensible government, stable and strong. What a shame we don't have one.

An honourable member: Hear, hear!

Mr McCORMACK: Hear, hear, he says! I'll take that interjection. I was having a crack and he's actually agreed with me. At least we've attracted one more to our side, to our way of thinking. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Accountability and Fairness) Bill is sly politics. It's a move by Labor to merge legislative alterations to the tax consultant and practitioner industry, following the PricewaterhouseCoopers tax leaks scandal, with changes to the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax Assessment Act, the PRRT.

I'm glad the member for Lingiari is here because I really want her to listen carefully to the comments I make about the Beetaloo basin, which is in her electorate and which our side of politics supports. The Northern Territory government, to its credit, supports the jobs and investment opportunities that the Beetaloo actually provides. The Beetaloo sub-basin, 500 kilometres south-east of Darwin, covers 28,000 square kilometres and is estimated to contain 500 trillion cubic feet of gas—500 trillion. I see the member for Lingiari nodding. I know she also supports investment opportunities, and I know she wants the Northern Territory to be the best it can be. I like the member for Lingiari. I think she's a good and decent member.

We heard a little earlier, just prior to the member for Moreton, the leader of the Greens, the member for Melbourne, going on about gas and the evils thereof. I appreciate he's put in some amendments to this legislation. Recently, his deputy leader, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, talked about her recent visit to her country of birth, Pakistan. This is what she told the Senate:

Australia's criminal inaction on climate is deeply felt there—felt in the extreme heat, felt in the melting glaciers washing away entire villages and felt in the everyday life of children in Pakistan who are suffocating in an ever deadly mix of intense heat and trapped pollution.

With that in mind, I looked up to see what Pakistan's greenhouse emissions are, the amount of greenhouse gases they put into the globe. What do you think they are? They're 0.9 per cent. Australia's are just over one per cent. I mean, what planet is she on? Seriously! What I would really like to hear sometime, some way, some days from the Greens is just a bit of positivity about Australia—just a smidge; just a tiny little bit—an infinitesimal amount of positivity about this nation and about what the Northern Territory's potential is. The Northern Territory's potential—and I've been there on many, many occasions—is unlimited, and so is northern Australia's.

Yet whether it's Beetaloo, Bowen or whatever gas field in Australia, we find that the Greens just don't want to invest in them.

We had a situation where the Victorian Labor government—how they keep getting re-elected is anyone's guess—wanted to ban onshore and offshore gas. Well, we're going to need some sort of energy to be able to power our kitchen appliances, our homes, our industries, our factories and our farms. The way we're going, if we listen to the Greens and we listen to the Leader of the Greens or his deputy, we'll shut everything down. They want every industry shut down. I know that schedule 5 of this bill relates to the PRRT gas project changes, and while we are moving towards more renewables in the system that is fine, provided it doesn't come at a cost to agriculture or to the arable farmland. We only have 10 per cent of arable farmland on the surface of the earth and we can't afford to lose too much more, or any more, given the fact that we've got a growing global population and need to be able to feed them. Too many children in particular go to bed with empty stomachs; it's just not right. Yet here we've got the Greens siding with Labor.

There was a very awkward press conference just this Monday with the member for Sydney—the water minister—and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who has never been a friend of farmers, agreeing on the changes to the Murray-Darling Basin. We need that plan to allow for farmers to have productive water and we need to not be taking a Sydney Harbour's worth of water away from farmers. We should be thanking our farmers three times a day every day because they grow the food that we eat, they grow the food that we export and they grow the food that provides for plenty of kids who don't live in Australia to make sure that they go to bed with a full stomach.

When you talk about gas, there's this demonisation of gas projects in this country which is beyond belief. Gas provides energy. Gas provides jobs. Gas provides investment. It happens in the Northern Territory, it happens in Queensland and it should happen right across the nation. Western Australia has shown us just how that state has become a powerhouse, from federation to now, on the back of the mining resources boom. It is a powerhouse exporter and a powerhouse of providing hope and opportunity for countries to which we export our energy, and so it should be.

With Labor deciding to justify changes to PRRT amendments, this bill will effectively cap the availability of deductible expenditure incurred by a person in relation to a petroleum project for a year of tax. I know the Greens leader went on about the big mining companies paying no tax; well, they employ a lot of people, and yes they do pay tax. But he would have them shut down, so he wouldn't have them employing anybody. The coalition has asked the Treasurer and his office for further detail of the proposal. We have made practical suggestions, unlike the Greens, to ensure that projects, investments and jobs in the gas sector are protected and promoted. Heaven forbid our school children be told the truth, and that is that gas projects have provided so much of the energy which powers their classrooms and so much of the energy which has enabled their schools to be funded and their parents' jobs to be protected. Gas and the other resources sector, which is all too often played down in this place, should be admired, promoted, promulgated and protected. The Treasurer's office has refused to respond to the coalition's very practical questions and very meaningful suggestions.

I hate to say it, but this is characteristic of Labor playing politics by deceit—they do. By tying problematic changes to the gas industry together with the widely supported changes to the tax industry, without answering what we felt was an olive branch of bipartisanship, it just goes to show what Labor's motives are, and, unfortunately, they are not in the national interest. It's just like how the Greens trying to shutdown our mining sector is not in the national interest. How on earth do the Greens think that we're going to pay for the schools, the roads, the hospitals and all the rest of the things that have made and given us such a quality of life? Yet this is typical Greens policy. They shout from the rooftops about one side of the Middle Eastern debate, and they want paedophiles, rapists and murderers released into the public with—for God's sake—an ankle bracelet. If you're being raped, that's really going to protect you! And then they call them refugees. It defies logic and it makes me so cross when you see some of the nonsense that is spouted by Greens members and senators.

What we see in this piece of legislation is a case study in how not to do things properly. There's a lack of seriousness in this government, which is endemic of most of what they do. As far back as May, the government announced its changes to the PRRT. As far back as May—about 12 months after getting into power. We've asked questions of the government. Do we have answers to those basic questions? No, we don't. Has the government engaged seriously with the coalition, or any other party for that matter, to progress this legislation? No. By attaching the $2.6 billion gas tax measures to the response to the PwC and Tax Practitioners Board scandal—or leak, call it what you like—the Treasurer's demonstrated that he is more focused on politics than outcomes. This is the same Treasurer who stood at the despatch box to deliver his May budget and became the first Treasurer in a quarter of a century to not use the word 'infrastructure'.

But they don't care about infrastructure, and we saw that when, prior to the budget, the member for Ballarat, minister for infrastructure, announced a 90-day review. Jules Verne wrote a book about going around the world in 80 days, but it took the infrastructure minister 200 or so days to finally announce her review. The review included savage cuts, which are now being disparaged by, of all people, the Labor premiers and treasurers from Queensland—your state, Deputy Speaker Young—New South Wales and Victoria. Annastacia Palaszczuk, Chris Minns and Jacinta Allan, respectively, are justified in their condemnation of just that.

Today, we had the unedifying spectacle of Steven Miles—handsome fellow that he is. He's not an unedifying spectacle as far as looks and image are concerned, but he shouldn't have needed to be in the federal parliament today. He should be in Queensland doing his job, but the Deputy Premier of Queensland has had to come to Canberra with at least four mayors of regional councils—Western Downs, Ipswich, Toowoomba and Isaac Regional—to argue the case for infrastructure for Queensland. It's one of our powerhouse states—a state which should be helping to lead the economic recovery, but, no, he's here arguing the toss about infrastructure with the member for Ballarat. When your own Labor premiers, deputy premiers, treasurers, roads ministers and transport ministers are condemning their federal Labor colleague, you know things are crook in Tallarook. You really do. But not just Tallarook—everywhere around the nation. Labor will come to the argument and say, 'Yes, but they pork barrelled, and they had colour coded spreadsheets.' Unfortunately, this mob has colour coded spreadsheets, but they're all red. They're all red for Labor, and so many projects out of envy, jealousy—I don't know what you'd call it.

But, even for the member for Lingiari, they should be supporting and engaging in enabling roads for the Beetaloo basin, and they should be supporting the Northern Territory with more infrastructure. I support Lingiari. 'It's happening,' the member for Lingiari says. Well it should be happening even more because your Territory holds the key to unlocking so much investment, hope, opportunity and reward for our nation and for our nation's coffers—the sorts of coffers that we need to fill to pay for hospitals, albeit ones run by states, and to pay for roads, many of which should be paid for by states, but only in a 20 per cent arrangement. That's what it is when the coalition's in; it's 20 per cent states and 80 per cent coalition. But, no, this mob wants fifty-fifty, and that's why the premiers of all these various Labor states are so filthy—and with every reason.

But I'll get back to this legislation. The behaviour of PwC that the Tax Practitioners Board unveiled over recent times plainly does not meet community standards. This legislation amends that. That's to be commended. Labor should have been more direct, more open, more transparent and more honest with the coalition. Our changes, our suggested moves and measures, on this bill and PRRT—I'm not sure why they've connected the two. It's like connecting Carlton and Collingwood and thinking that'd be a good merger. Go figure. But that's the Labor government. Unfortunately, they'll probably get it through. I just hope they get it through without the help or support of the Greens—or without the Greens amendments, because they are rubbish