Thank you Jennie and thank you Michael.
Thank you everyone for your warm welcome.
I also acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather, and elders past and present.
Governor-General and Mr Bryce. Distinguished guests.
Gough Whitlam’s Treasurer Frank Crean, Simon’s father, had a saying he was fond of. With taxes you buy civilisation, he’d say... Taxes meant you didn’t have to form free and voluntary agreements with your next-door neighbour to fix the potholes outside your door, or pay in full for urgent brain surgery an hour before it was performed.
The ATO, therefore, has been an integral part of Australia’s fabric for a hundred years.
Making our tax and superannuation laws work is what all our governments have needed, and you have provided.
Without tax revenue and superannuation savings, we face an uneasy time of it. It is, indeed, as the elder Crean says what we pay for civilised society.
In Australia it has funded, and rescued, and continued the Government policies that have developed our nation.
It all began in 1910 when Andrew Fisher’s government responded to the need for funds to pay for old age pensions and what then were called invalid pensions.
A federal tax system first enacted through the Land Tax Act was the instrument for funding these. The first land tax returns were issued in January 1911 and the Government required collection of the tax by the end of June.
The Income Tax Assessment Act 1915 — a relatively simple document of 22 pages on its debut —saw the introduction of a federal income tax that would help pay for the rising, calamitous costs of World War One.
The economic crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s led to the introduction of sales tax in 1930 which provided much needed ballast in the financial tsunami of those times.
The Income Tax Assessment Act of 1936 still governs much of the way we are, and how we make do.
Taxation revenue enabled Australia to pay for the costs of the Second World War which were mountainous and calamitous and trying in the extreme compared to those of the First. It was dreadfully expensive.
The profits of Australia’s banks today could have funded a year of this War.
The income tax instalment scheme began in 1941 and led to national income tax collection by the Commonwealth in 1942, a shrewd move then that the West Australians have seen ever since as a foolish surrender.
More recent are the changes following the national Tax Summit in July 1985, in which Paul Keating sought a GST and did not get it, and the Government announced a reform package that included capital gains tax and fringe benefits tax. Both of these came into effect in July 1986.
Australia’s fabric and fibre and its sense of where it was going changed forever with the introduction in 1993 of the superannuation guarantee of retirement incomes. It was the Keating Government’s proudest advance and the current generation’s direst need.
The introduction of the GST and business tax reform corresponded with the arrival of the new millennium.
My impression is that the ATO learnt a lot from that process – for instance, the importance of the relationship with tax agents and the importance of not just consulting, but going further and co-designing implementation, with what might be called the customers.
The ATO has achieved big changes in the nation’s revenue and the comfort of our old age at key points throughout the century.
It has been at the front line of reform. It has unflinchingly delivered in times of crisis. It has helped us through bushfires and floods, and the delivery of 8.43 million tax bonuses during the meltdown, in just three months.
Being at the front line isn’t easy, but it keeps you on your toes.
The ATO is supported here, unlike its American counterpart, by the overwhelming majority of Australians.
This is a point of pride. Most people, businesses, institutions, households, municipalities large and small, contribute their fair share in revenue for growth and development, education and training, health and welfare, all the things that keep us going.
The ATO has sought to connect with people, and fairly deal with businesses, and so improve and enhance and better shape what might be called the nation’s architecture.
It has dealt with the challenges of the times. Not the least of these was being, in good years and bad, the main administrator of one of the most reviewed, most reformed, and most contested areas of public policy and administration.
An area that leaves very little outside the envelope for consideration, or even philosophy -- subject as it is to continual checks of balance and fairness, and demarcation disputes and what might be called the impertinent scrutiny of good intensions.
In this regard, its outreach is unique.
It deals with all sorts of people. Even those people who, like Kerry Packer, don’t need to pay tax very often but have to line up for the conversation. This too is the line of duty. This too is work to be done.
In my previous role as Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services I saw clearly the intersection between taxation and a nation’s hopes and aspirations and its moral core.
Participation, inclusiveness, an underlying ethic of mercy and a sincere desire to find pathways through the misty wood for human beings confronting some of the most delicate and changeable issues (such as mental illness) on their way to a better, happier existence in their one life on earth, were ways, I found, to achieve healing and transformation, in programs of leadership and remedial conversation.
All these programs had a tap root through to the taxation system, to officers in this building, making decisions.
It became my purpose in my 1,000 days of work to make disability a mainstream political issue. I achieved at least a fraction of that purpose. I am finding in my present role that the sun never seems to set on taxation.
Today is a day, in this hundredth year, when we might reflect, acknowledge, and praise the significant good that our tax and super systems bring to us all, and hold fast to their future potential.
Today is also a step into the ATO’s next century and the first day of our future tax and super systems, a visionary program to say the least.
It is a step across a line towards a horizon worth viewing, and assessing, and striving for. A kind of promised land.
Your greatest laurels are ahead of you, I believe, earned in years to come by your best work with the community.
The past century attests to much you have done: your strong leadership, your sound values, your good and decent, unflinching hearts and your ability and willingness to continue to adapt to and serve the needs of your people.
On behalf of the Gillard Government I would like to congratulate you on this significant, unrepeatable milestone and wish you a happy hundredth birthday.
Treasury informs me that there are about 4,000 other Australians that are sharing their 100th birthday with you this year. We certainly now are in the age of the centenarian.
So a quiet toast to the ATO.
And I look forward to working with the ATO to build the next chapters of Australia’s history, and its people’s survival, and betterment, and honouring, through the tax and super systems.
Thank you.