Page 476 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 24 February 1993
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As I said, there is great concern here. It was an absolutely tragic case. The boy is physically damaged for life and I hate to think about the mental damage that has been done. As I said, I found it almost unbelievable that such a situation could have continued for year after year in spite of over 5,000 phone calls and 2,500 personal visits in a plea for justice which was thwarted at almost every turn.
Goods and Services Tax
MR HUMPHRIES (5.12): Madam Speaker, I rise to answer some points made by Mr Berry last week about sport and the way in which sport can be affected, allegedly, by GST and by the Fightback package. Madam Speaker, as has so often been the case in the course of this Federal election campaign, it turns out that what the Labor Party is saying about aspects of the Fightback package just do not stack up. What Mr Berry forgot to mention to us when he talked about how sport would somehow be more expensive under the GST is that Fightback involves not just adding a GST but abolishing seven taxes already applied and heavily affecting sport in this country.
Ms Follett: The coal tax.
Mr Kaine: Get rid of Mr Keating's 20 per cent wholesale tax.
MR HUMPHRIES: There is a 20 per cent wholesale sales tax on sporting goods and that costs this community something like $240m a year. That is going to be removed by the Federal Liberal government. Sporting clubs and organisations, even small ones, are hit by the Keating hidden tax scale system. Most sporting equipment, such as footballs, cricket bats, tennis racquets, fishing rods, et cetera, is subject to the present rate of 20 per cent sales tax. Costs of ground maintenance, club rooms and canteen equipment will also be much cheaper with the current sales tax abolished. Mowers, hoses, office furniture, computers, et cetera all carry a 20 per cent or more sales tax.
Built into the cost of other goods and services purchased by sporting clubs is the substantial indirect impact of the wholesale sales tax, fuel excise, customs duty, payroll tax, the training levy and the superannuation levy - maybe even the coal tax - all of which will be removed. The GST replaces all of those and will not adversely affect sporting organisations because any GST which is included in a club's purchases will be either totally refunded as soon as the sporting organisations put in a tax return to the Taxation Office or else immediately deducted from whatever GST is collected.
Let us look at how an individual sports man or woman might be affected by these changes. Let us take a tennis player, a person who plays tennis very regularly, who belongs to a tennis club and wants to see how they are going to be affected by a GST. Membership fees, it is true, on the face of it, will go up by 15 per cent; but, as I have explained earlier, there will be a lower base once the seven hidden indirect taxes are removed from the club. Let us ignore that for the time being; let us forget about that. Let us say that the membership fee is $110 a year.
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