Financial planners will eventually need to register as tax agents after three taxation bills passed through the Senate on Friday afternoon, despite opposition outrage.
While financial advisers have a further 12-month exemption, they face the vagaries of a second regulator and education requirements that are yet to be determined.
Senator Mathias Cormann was left fuming.
“Another day and another three Labor Party taxation bills which this arrogant government wants to arrogantly push through the Senate with just half an hour of debate,” he said.
“Normally each one of these bills—the Tax Laws Amendment (2013 Measures No. 1) Bill 2013, the Tax Laws Amendment (2013 Measures No. 2) Bill 2013 and the Tax Laws Amendment (2013 Measures No. 3) Bill 2013—would have a substantial debate in its own right, each one of these bills would be subject to the proper scrutiny of the Senate and each one of these bills would be properly fleshed out so that all of us could be in a position to make a considered and well-informed judgement about whether proceeding with it was in our national interest or not.
“But, while this government may have changed its leader, it is still the same old dysfunctional, divided, chaotic, incompetent and arrogant government as it was before.”
Cormann (right) saved some of his anger for the government’s actions in bringing financial advisers into the framework of the Tax Agent Services Act.
“The government wanted to ram this through the House of Representatives a couple of weeks ago. It wanted to ram it through the House of Representatives without even having an inquiry,” he said.
“Only because the Independents on this occasion agreed with our view that that was completely inappropriate, completely outrageous, were we able to enforce an inquiry.
“We said that it was unreasonable to impose a massive change in regulatory arrangements on financial advisers by putting them into the tax agent services regime from 1 July 2013 with less than a week—with just two or three days to go now—before that would have come into effect. We said that there should be an extension in the implementation date to 1 July 2014.
“We said that there should be an extension to the current exemption for financial advisers from the Tax Agent Services Act. We said that there needed to be some clarification around the scope of financial tax advice in the legislation. We said a whole range of other things. The government adopted, holus-bolus, all of our recommendations, but it would never have come to this. This bill would never have been improved if the government had got its way in ramming things through the House of Representatives the way it is trying to ram things through the Senate.”
