Otto von Bismarck remarked that “politics is the art of the possible.”
Finally, at the last minute, Deputy Treasurer Stephen Jones realised that it was going to be impossible to belligerently maintain his refusal to meet with the financial professionals to fix the broken laws they had been complaining about for a month.
In August, Jones introduced new laws requiring tax professionals to disclose “any” matters that may influence whether or not a client engages their services.
Legal advice confirmed this would require some mental health disclosures, and the chair of the government’s Tax Practitioners Board, responsible for administering the new law, also said mental health “could possibly be relevant” as a disclosure matter.
Demonstrating that denial is not just a river in Egypt, Jones insisted that this was not the case and refused to budge, having already introduced the new laws without consulting the industry.
Understandably, tax professionals were up in arms, calling for the law to be amended to ensure that mental health issues did not need to be disclosed to clients, along with a host of other remedies that the flawed laws demanded.
The Coalition and independent MPs united to denounce the inadequacy of what the Labor Party was doing. In the end, only political desperation allowed Stephen Jones to do his job and clean up the mess he had created.
Labor was on the verge of being crushed in the Senate, and came close to losing a vote there anyway, even after Jones at the last minute conceded to all the demands he had previously refused to budge on, to the satisfaction of the tax industry.
Junior minister Stephen Jones (pictured) refused to meet tax professionals until the last minute, angering the industry and independents.
The vote to reject the proposal went ahead anyway and ended in a 31-31 tie, meaning that Labour’s laws were all but scrapped despite his last-minute change of heart. Before the vote, the minister issued a statement confirming that he would back down on each of the tax professionals’ demands.
Had he agreed to do so from the start, there would never have been a need for a vote, or an advertising campaign condemning the Labour government, or all the unnecessary anger Jones has caused by his lack of consultation within the industry and among independents.
Independent Senator David Pocock voted with Labor after it agreed in writing to each of the tax professionals’ demands, but stood up in the Senate after the vote to declare that if the minister failed to honour his promise to clean up the mess he had created within the promised timeframe, Pocock would himself table another disavowal motion and switch sides, guaranteeing that Labor would lose.
There was no better demonstration of frustration and distrust at the way the Labour Party has acted in this matter.
This is the story of an altercation that should never have happened, and would not have happened if the young minister and his office had demonstrated even basic competence before being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the negotiating table.
They denied that their laws required disclosure of mental health information, even though legal advice confirmed that they had done so. They retracted their claim.
They refused to admit that forcing disclosure of ongoing research, rather than results, was damaging to business. In the end, they backed down.
They remained steadfast in their insistence that prosecutors should reveal the identity of their clients, thus breaking with all the traditions of confidentiality that exist in other professions such as law and medicine. In the end, they backed down.
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell (pictured left), had to intervene to ensure Deputy Treasurer Stephen Jones’ mishandling of the accountant issue did not get worse.
The changes the government has made to the law are exactly what the industry has been asking for for months. What was the point of all the discussion up until now?
Jones’s unwillingness to even meet with the industry his new laws would harm brought the different sectors together in a way rarely seen.
The Labour Party only had the support of the Greens in the Senate (of course).
Not that even the Greens were united in supporting Labour’s now-abandoned belligerence on this issue.
Green MP Max Chandler-Mather wrote to Jones demanding changes to his “vague and contradictory” laws.
Former Labour senator Fatima Payman weighed in again, this time not to refer to Gaza, but to support beleaguered tax professionals.
She sided with independents such as Pauline Hanson and Jacqui Lambie, among many others, as well as the Coalition.
A unitary group that Jones managed to assemble only thanks to extraordinary incompetence.
Pocock was with them too, until he gave Labour one last chance to clean up its own mess.
It was then that Jones finally did what a responsible minister should have done long ago: he asked to see the industry bodies he had ignored, dismissed and insulted for months.
His first meeting with them took place just over an hour before the vote.
The minister had been instructed to clean up this mess by none other than Anthony Albanese’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, who began calling independents to see where the numbers stood once the deputy treasurer’s failings became all too apparent.
Mental health expert Patrick McGorry (pictured) welcomed Labor’s move to exclude disclosures about mental health, telling Daily Mail Australia the move was “positive”.
The intervention of senior officials became necessary to save political face.
On Tuesday, during a press conference, Treasurer Jim Chalmers was asked about this sad story. Trying to hide a wry smile, the Treasurer stayed away from the mess and told the journalist to discuss the matter with his deputy minister, because responsibility for the matter was in the “very capable hands” of Stephen Jones.
Jones had insisted that his laws did not require accountants to disclose mental health problems to their clients. His media parrots cheered him on, repeating that such concerns were “unfounded,” even though everyone knew that legal advice proved otherwise.
It was disgraceful behaviour, a bit rubbish.
Jones backtracked on that issue 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 disclosure of mental health information, told the Daily Mail Australia upon hearing of Labor’s backtracking that it was “positive that they appear to have ruled out the possibility of disclosing any mental health history”.
Yes, it was.
In an attempt to muddy the waters before the rejection motion came to a head, the minister’s fan club in the media shamelessly attempted to suggest that McGorry’s concerns, clearly articulated in writing, were exaggerated. Which, as we have seen, they clearly were not.
Of course, once the war of words was over and the Labour Party had agreed to fix its bad laws, polite corporate speak took over.
One of the twelve bodies critical of the government’s laws – the Chartered Accountants of Australia and New Zealand – issued a press release thanking the deputy treasurer “for listening to the concerns of the tax profession”.
Stephen Jones thanked the industry for “its constructive engagement with us on this matter.”
In the end Jones gave in, that’s true.
Committed in the same way that Monty Python’s Black Knight committed himself to King Arthur: by letting him pass after the Black Knight was reduced to a limbless torso in the dirt, screaming threats that he would bite King Arthur’s leg off if he ever returned.
The famous Monty Python scene
