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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (1 September) . . Page.. 1607 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

What is the justification for this levy, Mr Speaker? The justification, according to the Minister's speech, is that it will reduce the call on the wider Consolidated Revenue to maintain emergency services and to finance improvements. In other words, when you have paid all your taxes and it has all gone into Consolidated Revenue, do not think for a minute that that entitles you to have a fire truck arrive at your door when you have a fire or to have an ambulance arrive at your door when you are ill because, according to the Minister, it does not entitle you to that at all. Accordingly, it is unreasonable to expect that those services will be provided out of Consolidated Revenue. That is where all the taxes go in the first place.

The Government has made a decision that these emergency services will not be provided after people have paid all the taxes, which they are duty-bound to pay. They will now be asked, through this backdoor method, to pay an additional tax. But the Government says, "We will not call it that. We will leave the impression that it is the insurance companies themselves that are going to be paying this tax, not the premium payers". Mr Speaker, it is taxation by stealth; it is taxation by deception. The response from the Opposition is quite accurate.

The business community and property owners have objected to this measure, but the biggest objection has come from older, retired people. That is where the majority of the opposition has come from. By imposing a tax in this form those people can expect no relief whatsoever. There is no way that the insurance companies, when they are passing this levy on to their premium payers, are going to say to the senior citizens, "Well, you do not have to pay as much as everybody else. You are entitled to a concession". It is a function of government to make that sort of concession, but they have successfully foisted the responsibility onto the insurance company - if this legislation goes through.

The number of phone calls and letters that I have had from senior citizens distressed by this measure is astonishing. I wonder whether the Minister has received similar letters and telephone calls and whether, as the Chief Minister did with the response to the Estimates Committee report, he has simply shrugged these things off as being irrelevant - that these people do not count in the scheme of things; it does not matter if the retired pensioner cannot afford the extra costs of insurance. Quite frankly, they cannot afford not to take out the insurance because, if they lose their possessions through a fire or something of that kind, they simply do not have the resources to replace them. They are caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place. These people are being forced by the Government to pay a significant increase in their insurance premiums and, frankly, they cannot afford to make those payments. Does this have any impact on the Minister? Not at all, because the Minister did not think it through.

There is another element of unfairness here which the Minister might care to comment on. It has been put to me that people who live in residential properties that are run by a body corporate are going to be treated as commercial enterprises and are going to suffer the commercial rate of increase rather than the residential rate. A very large number of people in this city live in townhouses that are part of bodies corporate. Are they - the Minister might give an assurance if it is not the case - going to sustain a significant increase even though they are only living in residential units that happen to be part of a body corporate? What is the justification for that?

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