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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2810 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

We are also concerned by the degree of retrospectivity which is applied in this particular bill to effect payroll tax arrangements made since 1 July this year. For something like the last two months, employers in the territory will be operating in an arrangement where they have to assume, but don't know for sure, that particular legislation will come into force and will change the basis on which they make arrangements to pay payroll tax. I think that is not appropriate, particularly in matters like this. Certainty for employers-certainty for business-is a critically important factor and should not be gainsaid.

I come back to the Appropriation Bill for a moment. It is true that the opposition will support the Appropriation Bill. And it is true that this year the opposition will support the Appropriation Bill unamended. But it is also, I think, necessary to put on the record that the opposition has debated long and hard whether in future the question of amendments to a budget should be ruled out entirely. Although it is not our intention to amend this year's budget, we do believe it is appropriate to put on the public record our view that the previous convention-however fragile, however mauled it might have been from time to time-that the budget of the day was either rejected or accepted but not amended has been eliminated by events of recent years.

Members will recall that, in 2000, the budget for 2000-01 as presented was indeed rejected by the Assembly, not on the part of a majority of members of this place as a way of changing the government-as far as I could tell that was not the intention in rejecting it. Rather, it was done, on the part of some members at least, as a way of being able to require the government to change the budget. And indeed the government did change the budget and the budget was subsequently accepted.

The following year-that is, last year's budget, 2001-02-members will recall that, although the budget was passed as presented, it was subject to a number of motions to amend it on the part of the Labor opposition, using the argument, as I recall, that the free school bus scheme was inappropriate and that money proposed to be spent there should be spent elsewhere within the budget. At the time the then government put on the record that to signal the willingness on the part of the opposition to move amendments of that kind, and to actually move those amendments, was a change in the landscape and that, for my part, I would not allow the Liberal Party to be put in the position where it would guarantee Labor budgets unamended but would face and have to wear from time to time Liberal budgets being amended because the same restraint was not exercised on the Labor side of the chamber.

However, at this time the opposition does not believe that the new government's budget is seriously deficient enough to warrant amendment, and it therefore does not propose to move any amendments or to support any amendments this year. But I do very clearly give notice of the fact that we reserve the right to move such amendments in future years.

The budget makes a number of important steps-and I briefly want to touch on this before sitting down-which I do not believe are sufficiently transparent, for the Assembly in particular but the community in general, to understand properly. In particular, the proposals for what we have called the socialisation of land development in the territory are proposals which the Estimates Committee spent a very large amount of time attempting to understand, with only limited success. This was partly because the

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