Otto von Bismarck said: ‘Politics is the art of the possible’.
Finally, at the last minute, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones realized that he could no longer continue his refusal to talk to tax preparers about fixing the violations of his laws, which they had been complaining about for a month.
In August, Jones introduced new laws requiring tax advisors to disclose “any” matters that could affect whether a client uses their services.
Legal advice confirmed that this would require disclosure of certain mental health matters. The chairman of the government’s Tax Practitioners Board, which is responsible for implementing the new law, also said that mental health “may be relevant” as a subject for disclosure.
Jones proved that denial is not just a river in Egypt. He insisted that it was not and refused to budge, having already introduced the new laws without consulting the industry.
Understandably, tax advisors rebelled and wanted the law changed to ensure that mental health issues did not have to be reported to clients, among a number of other fixes that the flawed laws required.
The Coalition and the crossbench came together to call out the inappropriateness of what Labor was doing. In the end, only political desperation made Stephen Jones do his job and clean up the mess he had created.
Labor would be outgunned in the Senate and had already nearly lost a vote there, even after Jones agreed at the very last minute to all the demands he had previously refused to compromise on, to the satisfaction of the tax industry.
Assistant Minister Stephen Jones (pictured) refused to meet tax advisers until the last minute, sparking anger from industry and opposition parties.
The vote to disallow went ahead anyway and was a tie, with 31 votes apiece, meaning that Labor’s laws were all but cancelled despite the final somersault. Before the vote, the Minister issued a statement confirming that he would back down on all the taxmen’s demands.
If he had agreed to that from the start, there would never have been a need for a vote, there would never have been a need for an advertising campaign condemning the Labour government, and there would never have been all the unnecessary anger that Jones has caused through his lack of consultation within the sector and between independents.
Independent Senator David Pocock voted with Labor after the party had agreed in writing to all the tax advisers’ demands. However, after the vote in the Senate he stood up and declared that if the Minister did not deliver on his promise to clean up the mess he had created within the promised timeframe, Pocock would bring a new motion of refusal himself and change sides. That would guarantee Labor a loss.
There was no better example of the frustration and distrust in the way the Labour Party has handled this issue.
This is the story of a conflict that should never have happened, and would not have happened if the Secretary of State and his officials had shown even a modicum of competence before being dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table.
They denied that their laws forced disclosure about mental health, even though legal advice confirmed that they did. They admitted it.
They refused to admit that forcing disclosures of ongoing investigations, rather than findings, was damaging to companies. Eventually, they gave in.
They stuck to their position that tax agents should inform their clients, breaking every tradition of client confidentiality that exists in other professions such as law and medicine. Eventually, they relented.
The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Tim Gartrell (pictured left) had to intervene to ensure that Assistant Chancellor of the Exchequer Stephen Jones’ poor handling of the audit issue did not get worse
The government’s changes to the law are exactly what the industry has been asking for months ago. What has been the point of all the bickering so far?
Jones’s unwillingness to even talk to the industry, which would be harmed by his new laws, united the dissenters in a way rarely seen before.
In the Senate, the Labour Party could (of course) only count on the support of the Greens.
Not that even the Greens were unanimous in their support for the Labour Party’s now abandoned combative stance on this issue.
Green MP Max Chandler-Mather wrote to Jones demanding that his “vague and contradictory” laws be changed.
Former Labor Senator Fatima Payman returned to the scene, this time not on the Gaza issue but to show support for tax consultants under fire.
She sided with troublemakers like Pauline Hanson and Jacqui Lambie, and with the coalition.
A unity ticket that Jones only managed to put together through extraordinary incompetence.
Pocock was among them, too, until he gave Labor one last chance to clean up their own mess.
Then Jones finally did what a responsible minister should have done long ago: he asked to speak to the trade associations he had ignored, rejected and insulted for months.
His first meeting with them took place just over an hour before the vote.
The minister had been tasked with cleaning up the mess by none other than Anthony Albanese’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell. Gartrell himself had already begun calling MPs to get his facts straight when the assistant finance minister’s failings became all too apparent.
Mental health expert Patrick McGorry (pictured) welcomed Labor’s move to ban disclosure about mental health, telling Daily Mail Australia the move was “positive”.
To save political face, intervention from high-ranking figures was necessary.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers was asked about the sad saga at a press conference on Tuesday. The treasurer did his best to keep an ironic smile off his face, but stayed out of the mess, telling the journalist he had to take the matter up with his junior minister, because responsibility for the matter lay in the “very capable hands” of Stephen Jones.
Jones had insisted that his laws did not force accountants to disclose mental health problems to clients. He was encouraged by his media parrots, who repeated the line that such concerns were “unfounded,” even though they all knew that legal advice proved otherwise.
It was outrageous behavior, a bit of nonsense.
Jones was already pushing back on that point, even before yesterday’s broader capitulation. Mental health expert and former Australian of the Year Professor Patrick McGorry, who had raised concerns about the possibility of forced mental health disclosure, told Daily Mail Australia upon hearing of Labor’s backlash that it was “positive that they seem to have ruled out the possibility of disclosure of a mental health history”.
Yes, that was it.
In an attempt to muddy the waters before the motion to dismiss came to a head, the Minister’s fan club in the media shamelessly attempted to suggest that McGorry’s concerns, clearly expressed in writing, were exaggerated. Which, as we have seen, was clearly not the case.
Once the war of words was over and the Labour Party had finally agreed to change the bad laws, polite business talk took over.
One of the dozens of bodies critical of the government’s laws – Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand – issued a press release thanking the assistant treasurer “for listening to the concerns of the tax profession”.
Stephen Jones thanked the industry for “their constructive engagement with us on this matter”.
In the end, Jones compromised, it’s true.
He compromised in the same way that Monty Python’s Black Knight compromised with King Arthur: he let him pass after the Black Knight was reduced to a limbless hulk in the dust, and he threatened to bite King Arthur’s leg off if he ever returned.
The famous Monty Python scene