Andrew Leigh

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 29 JULY 2019

Australians are rightly concerned about multinational tax avoidance. They want a crackdown on tax havens and profit shifting. But what do they get instead?

They get Senator Cormann, who received free flights from Helloworld, a company headed by Andrew Burnes, the former Liberal Party federal treasurer, and a company that received a contract to provide travel management services to the Commonwealth in 2015.

They get the member for Hume, who co-founded a company located in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven. It's called Eastern Australia Irrigation, and its headquarters is, to be fair, a long way east of Australia—16,000 kilometres, to be exact.

They get the member for Fadden, who organised for the firm Shac Communications to donate $112,000 to the LNP's Fadden Forum before the firm went bust owing $129,000 to the tax office. When he was asked why the LNP should get money before the ATO, the member replied, 'The Fadden Forum does not exist.'

The Liberals were the party of the 1980s bottom-of-the-harbour schemes. Today, they're the party that fought a banking royal commission, tried to undermine the Future of Financial Advice reforms and wound back tax transparency. If only this government were as tough on tax havens as they are on welfare recipients, asylum seekers and pensioners!

This mob aren't a meritocracy; they're a mate-ocracy.