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senate vote 2021-08-09#3
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2021-09-10 09:42:54
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Title
Bills — Treasury Laws Amendment (Covid-19 Economic Response No. 2) Bill 2021; Consideration of House of Representatives Message- Treasury Laws Amendment (Covid-19 Economic Response No. 2) Bill 2021 - Consideration of House of Representatives Message - Do not insist on amendments
Description
<p class="speaker">Simon Birmingham</p><p>I move:</p><p class="italic">That the committee does not insist on its amendment, to which the House of Representatives has disagreed.</p>- The majority voted in favour of a [motion](https://www.openaustralia.org.au/senate/?gid=2021-08-09.27.6) to not insist on its amendments to the bill, after the House of Representatives disagreed with them. This means that the bill can now [be passed](https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-works/bills-and-laws/making-a-law-in-the-australian-parliament/), as its final form has been agreed to in both Houses of parliament.
- ### What does the bill do?
- According to the [bill homepage](https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:legislation/billhome/r6745), the bill was introduced to:
- * *enable the Treasurer to make rules for economic response payments to provide support to an entity where they are adversely affected by restrictions imposed by a state or territory public health order that is directed at controlling the transmission of COVID-19;*
- * *enable tax information to be disclosed to Australian government agencies for the purposes of administering COVID-19 business support programs;*
- * *make payments received by eligible businesses under certain COVID-19 business support programs and Commonwealth COVID-19 disaster payments exempt from income tax; and*
- * *reinstate a temporary mechanism for ministers to change arrangements relating to meeting information and document requirements under Commonwealth legislation.*
<p class="speaker">Malcolm Roberts</p><p>I serve the people of Queensland and Australia, and I'm very proud to be the people's servant. As part of my job, I believe it's important to scrutinise government spending of taxpayers' money. That's the ultimate accountability. What Senator Patrick's amendment does, which the government has rejected in the lower house, is enable public scrutiny. Public scrutiny is far more intense than any scrutiny this parliament can give it, because people working within the companies that are receiving money actually scrutinise the spending that taxpayer money. We need to be open about shovelling tens of billions—hundreds of billions—of dollars of taxpayer money into companies. The government shows, by its actions in the lower house and by its lack of support for Senator Patrick's amendment last week, that it is afraid of accountability and public scrutiny. Why? That's the question I ask. Why is this government afraid of accountability and public scrutiny? And, when push comes to shove, the Labor Party is the same. We've had almost eight decades of shoddy governance in this federal parliament.</p><p>Let's look at the COVID history and where hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money is going. In March 2020, we looked at Italy, France, Spain and China and we saw thousands of people, reportedly, dying. We said to the government in March, when we had our first single-day sitting, 'We will support you.' We waved the JobSeeker measures through. Then, in April, we waved the JobKeeper measures through. We said: 'Get on with the job. But, in the face of uncertainty, we will expect you to come up with the data, we will expect you to come up with a plan for managing this virus and we will hold you accountable.' I started holding them accountable in May, gently at first. But look at the mess that has been and continues to be created in this country. There is a complete lack of leadership at state and federal level. These are the fruits of 80 years of shoddy governance, and now we see the federal government not willing to let the public scrutinise the spending of the public's own money.</p><p>Just last week we had two lawyers give their services in the High Court. The High Court ruled that the national cabinet is no such thing, and I commend Senator Patrick for initiating that. Why was the so-called national cabinet enacted? I told Senator Hanson right from the start that I believed there was a very strong and very clear reason for it. The government didn't know how to manage the virus. If the management of the virus went belly up, they'd be able to blame the national cabinet. If it succeeded, the Prime Minister would be able to take the credit. Remember: this Prime Minister was on his knees after the bushfire crisis. The only thing that saved him was the entry of COVID into this country. He was going downhill in the polls.</p><p>Last year, it was exposed that our country has been mismanaged for many, many decades. Our productive capacity is shot. We can't make basic essentials in this country. COVID exposed that. We are now dependent on other countries. The last 18 months has shone further light and shown the complete mismanagement of this virus. No state government has any idea what it's doing, with capricious lockdowns. There's a complete lack of leadership, and Labor have limped along. They're not a credible opposition. It is costing lives now and it will cost lives in the future.</p><p>I asked for the data and didn't get any from the government. I asked the Chief Medical Officer and the Department of Health secretary, and they said the mortality of this virus is low to moderate. It is not as severe, relatively, as past respiratory diseases. The transmissibility is high. But there's been no plan. There's been no segregation of the data and no detailed plan. We know some people, like Senator Patrick, don't even feel it. They don't even know they've got it, because they don't have symptoms. For other people, it is a mild cold. For other people it is a flu. Other people have lingering ailments. Other people can die. So we look at a plan. There are seven components in the plan, and I went through these in the Senate last week.</p><p>First of all, what we're seeing instead of a plan is state governments blaming each other, state governments contradicting themselves, state governments blaming the federal government, and the federal government blaming the state governments. All the while we, as taxpayers, are paying for that mismanagement. On the basic practice of lockdowns, even the UN World Health Organization—crooked, corrupt, incompetent, dishonest organisation that it is—now admits that lockdowns are not the answer. Lockdowns are a blunt instrument for use initially to get control, which tells us that the state governments and their benefactors—their funders, the federal government—are not in control of this virus.</p><p>Secondly, we've seen countries like Taiwan have effective testing, tracing and quarantining. They are not locking everyone down and destroying the economy. Their economy is bubbling along fine. They are quarantining the sick and the vulnerable. That's the way to do it. We have seen people like Governor DeSantis in Florida, which has a large proportion of elderly people, apologise to the people of Florida for locking his state down the first time. It's never happened again. Florida is doing much the same as the other states with the response to COVID. The states, like California, that have shut down and locked down are doing worse.</p><p>But our country can't come up with anything better than this mishmash. We now see injections with vaccines that have only provisional approval and have caused tens of thousands of deaths overseas. We see a government for the first time in human history injecting something into people and causing deaths. We see in this country provisional approval for a not fully tested vaccine. But at the same time we see ivermectin, a known treatment, a known cure and a known prophylactic. It has been approved in this country for use for other diseases since 2013. It has been proven over six decades around the world as safe. It's proven to be affordable. It's now been proven in South American countries, Asian countries, Indian states and some European countries, I believe, as successful at treating COVID. There are 40 to 50 medical and scientific papers verifying that. A doctor here in Australia in Sydney treated 24 very ill patients in quarantine with it. They all survived. They all got well quickly. The two people that weren't treated died. Ivermectin is known and proven, and yet, while we can get vaccines provisionally approved in no time when not fully tested, we can't get on in approving the safe, known drug ivermectin.</p><p>Where is the plan? There is no plan. The core question is: how can a government refuse Senator Patrick's amendment? It is an inoffensive measure. It is not going to cost much. It is going to save money, as it is doing in New Zealand. But the government runs away. The objective of this mishmash and mismanagement of COVID is not health. If it were, they would be approving ivermectin. If it were, they would be very seriously questioning lockdowns, because lockdowns are costing lives.</p><p>We now see that the objective is not health; we now see that the objective is more along the lines of control. Think about this: there is talk of a 'vaccine prison'. Those are my words for a vaccine passport, because it's not a passport; it is a prison. People can't go to the supermarket unless they have been vaccinated. There is talk of that. It's proposed in New York and other places; it's been considered in this country. People's work—their livelihood—is being jeopardised by the 'vaccine prison' threat. I understand there are construction workers now under that fear in Sydney. People want to go to the gyms to be healthy. There's talk about the 'vaccine prison' not giving them permission to do that. There would be lack of mobility through public transport. It may be denied through the 'vaccine prison'. Basic freedoms already affected are the freedom of thought, the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression, the freedom of association, the freedom of exchange, the freedom of travel and the freedom of mobility. These are basic freedoms in our country. The objective, as I said, is not health.</p><p>Then we see Pfizer's revenue in the last quarter was $19 billion. That's a pure profit of around $4 billion in just three months. Is this why the government are protecting them by banning the use of ivermectin for COVID? Things just do not add up. This is not about health, or, if it is, it's very shoddy, uncaring incompetence. This is about freedom and control and accountability. <i>(Time expired)</i></p> <p class="speaker">Rex Patrick</p><p>I rise to encourage the Senate to insist on the amendment. It is a very simple amendment. It's not offensive in any way. It requires the tax commissioner to publish the names of entities who receive JobKeeper, the number of individuals for whom the entity received the JobKeeper payment and the total amount that they received, with the option of also publishing information about how much the entity has paid back. For a company to profit from JobKeeper was never the intention of the fund. There are companies that have paid back JobKeeper because it is the right thing to do. It's a very simple amendment. It's really an amendment that was basically put together by looking at what happens on the New Zealand government website, where they basically display this information. Just to be very, very clear: it does not display any company information at all; it displays the amount of money that the taxpayer gave to the company to support them.</p><p>I heard Senator Birmingham on television this morning trying to justify the government's approach. It was a wet-lettuce-leaf attempt at a justification. Let everyone understand exactly what is happening here: after the taxpayer pays their tax, the money is taken and given to companies and some of them are funnelling that into dividends and into executive bonuses, and, sadly, Minister Birmingham thinks that is okay. He thinks that's all right. Don't worry; it is only taxpayers' money. I can tell you that the people of South Australia are really angry about this. It can be fixed by doing something that is relatively simple. It's what New Zealand has done, and it just involves the publication of the recipients and how much they received. This is what it's like to be in the Liberal Party: you have business mates and you get to support them at the expense of regular voters, regular Australians.</p><p>I introduced the motion and I thank the Senate for supporting it. It went to the other place and, unsurprisingly, because it is dominated by the Liberal-National coalition, they removed the amendment. The Senate has the ability to insist on the motion, and that's what we're being asked to do now. I'm happy for Senator Gallagher to stand up on a point of order and say I'm misleading the chamber, but unfortunately the Labor Party are not going to support it this time around. It's almost unimaginable. I've been contacted by a whole range of Labor supporters this morning that have indicated they will not be Labor supporters after this event here in the chamber. Basically, what's happened is the Labor Party were pretending to support a transparency measure. They were pretending to care about workers who pay tax. They were pretending to have high moral fibre and social integrity. And, of course, we now find out it was a ruse. There's no reasonable proposition or explanation you can have for the fact that over the weekend somehow the Labor Party has backflipped on this. I don't think they've backflipped; they just lack courage. They pretend that they support these things but in fact they don't.</p><p>Why are we seeing what's happening here? Why are we seeing Labor walking away from this measure? The answer's really simple: they don't want it to go back to the House and have the Prime Minister basically reject the bill. But they haven't even got the politics right. The reason this bill is necessary is that the Prime Minister failed Sydney. He failed through a lack of national quarantine and he failed because of the vaccine rollout, and that's left Sydney in lockdown. If the Labor Party think that Scott Morrison is going to reject a bill that helps Sydney get out of the mess that he created, then I say that they haven't thought this through. If there were ever a bill where the Labor Party could have said, 'You know what, we're going to stand our ground; we're going to stand up for the right thing to do,' it's this bill. What this tells the Australian public is that under no circumstances will the Labor Party stand up for Australians.</p><p>I think I said in the chamber last year that I was going to help you with your marketing. I'm going to buy you a dog. I am going to buy you a dog and it's going to be a dog that rolls over every time a Liberal Party member walks into the room, because that's exactly what you're doing here. I had a meeting with a senior coalition minister last year—it was about this time last year—and what this person said to me was, 'Rex, I love playing chicken with the Labor Party because they always swerve.' You have no courage. You need to stand up and actually support something that you believe in instead of getting worried about the politics. Instead of being incapable of explaining what's happening to your voters, to your supporters, you're simply saying, 'No, that's too hard.' It's much, much easier to reject the amendment, and the Australian taxpayer will suffer; the very workers that you claim are your constituents will suffer. It's not on, and the Australian public will hold you to account on this—certainly the crossbench will, but the Australian public are watching. I urge you, Senator Gallagher, to change position and support this amendment to insist that it stays in the bill.</p> <p class="speaker">Malcolm Roberts</p><p>I want to make a correction. The national cabinet decision was not a result from the High Court. It was made in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal by the Federal Court Justice Richard White. My apologies. I wanted the record corrected.</p> <p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>
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