Page 3925 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 October 1991
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Liquor Licence Payments
MR STEVENSON: My question is addressed to the Chief Minister. It concerns payments by businesses holding liquor licences. Under the budget, the licence payments for new businesses will be payable quarterly, whereas for those businesses that previously held liquor licences they will remain payable yearly. The question is: Firstly, where is the equity in old businesses being able to pay yearly and new businesses being required to pay quarterly; and, secondly, if one were going to favour anybody, would it not be new businesses, as they are just starting up and have not been established?
MS FOLLETT: I thank Mr Stevenson for the question. I think Mr Stevenson will need to go back a little bit and just review the fact that under the old liquor licensing arrangement there was a significant amount of bad debt, a significant amount of inability on the part of the Commissioner for Revenue to collect liquor licence payments, for a variety of reasons. That largely arose because of the long time delay between the collections of liquor licensing fees.
Under the previous Government a scheme was proposed to introduce a quarterly liquor licensing arrangement; but under that scheme, of course, what was proposed was that old businesses would, in effect, have to pay a double amount for their fees because of the introduction of the new scheme on top of the operation of the old scheme.
Mr Duby: No, they would pay for four years in three. That is not double.
MS FOLLETT: Of course, this was somewhat abhorrent to people already in the business of selling liquor. I know that Mr Duby has tried to justify what he was proposing, but I think he would be forced to accept that his proposal was indeed abhorrent to people already in the industry. So, in government, I accepted fully that there was a need to overcome the previous problems in collecting liquor licensing fees, and the Government has developed quarterly assessment and payment arrangements which both address the concerns of liquor licensees and reduce the Territory's exposure to bankruptcy and bad debts in the liquor licensing area.
The new scheme, as Mr Stevenson has correctly said, will require new licensees to pay quarterly in advance before a licence is issued or renewed. Existing licensees, as, again, Mr Stevenson has said, will continue to pay in arrears, but they will be required to pay quarterly. So, we will not have that very long gap between the collections of the money. It is a fact that there is a different scheme for older licensees and for new licensees; but I think it is a matter of striking a balance between the need for arrangements to protect the ACT from the bad debts and the need, of course, not to disadvantage people who are already in business.
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