Page 3321 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 24 November 1992
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DEATH OF MR BILL MASON
MR MOORE: Madam Speaker, I move:
That the Assembly expresses its deep regret at the death of Mr Bill Mason and tenders its profound sympathy to his widow and family in their bereavement.
I first met Bill Mason when he ran for the Australian Democrats in the First ACT Legislative Assembly election. During that time it became very obvious that Bill was single-mindedly in favour of a reform of the Australian and ACT taxation systems. As a Georgist, Bill favoured doing away with all taxation on productivity and replacing the taxation system with a tax on land. Bill favoured this system because of his broad awareness of position in the community and those who are impoverished in our community. Bill had a vision for an ACT and an Australia with no unemployment; for an equitable Australia where the very wealthy paid tax on speculation, rather than a tax on people's work.
In a recent letter Bill suggested an equitable system of replacing, say, a $74m payroll tax with a one per cent land value tax which would reap $7.4 billion, saying that it would have the following advantages: An immediate drop of $74m in annual ACT production costs; lower prices of ACT goods and services; increased production and sales in and from the ACT; new businesses established or moving to the ACT without subsidy; more employment; increased incomes of employers and employees; lower and middle income home owners paying less tax, but the wealthy paying more; less poverty and public welfare expenditure; fewer bankruptcies; cheaper land near existing services; smaller mortgages and eventual lower interest rates; repopulation of inner suburbs; less new, costly, sprawling environmentally polluting destruction of public and private infrastructure; and a smaller public transport subsidy.
Bill Mason was one of those people who had a quite significant influence on my own thinking. What has become clear is that our current taxation system has not managed to provide the network available to tax the wealthy. There is no question that the very wealthy in our community pay the least tax, while those in the lower middle class carry the bulk of the weight of looking after the rest of the community. It is that inequity that Bill Mason was attempting to address.
As recently as in the last fortnight, Bill Mason telephoned from his hospital bed at John James to remind me of some of the advantages of the land tax system. I think most members here will certainly remember Bill Mason for his determination, if nothing else. We have begun to make a small transition in the ACT. There has been some transition towards land tax. A leasehold system, conducted appropriately, is a form of land tax. Our rates are a form of land tax. There has been an extension of the normal land tax from commercial business properties to residential business properties. The question facing us now is whether that form of land tax should continue as a method of taxing those who can most easily afford it, in order to provide work and services for those who can least afford them.
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