Page 1896 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 May 2005
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Instead of putting money aside for the inevitable downturn, the government has squandered it, and I suspect it will continue to do so. Amounts that could and should have been returned to businesses and individuals in this territory as tax cuts or reductions in land tax or rates have already been spent or committed. Instead of easing the burden on the citizens and businesses of Canberra, the government has taxed them even more. We have got rates on average in households increasing by $104, we have rates on business premises rising by on average $312, and of course today families have also heard they will be slugged with higher water charges estimated to be about $30 a year. All these things assume that people have an endless capacity to pick up the cost of government error.
I will be very interested to see what happens to unimproved valuations as a basis for raising rates. The question is: will they be raised? Will we see a situation where the land value of a property is deemed to have risen but the house value has fallen? Nobody will convince me that housing costs are going down, and it is very clear that we have got a softening in the property market. Yet the budget figures project constant increases in valuation, on which 50 per cent of the rate increase is based.
And in addition to this rate slug, parking fines are up and the enforcers are moving in. The government has pledged to get tougher on the newly categorised criminals who overstay their car park. The Minister for Urban Services seems strangely proud of his new role in pursuit of the mums and dads taking their kids to school or going shopping. He wants more mobile speed camera vans—not to promote safety but, as the budget makes clear, to raise more funds for the government. It is a shameful situation. I look today in The Canberra Times at a letter from Robert Wilson from Deakin—
Mr Hargreaves: Well, it has got to be true then.
MR MULCAHY: Whether it is true or not, it is an expression from one of those people out there who actually have an interest in these affairs. Mr Wilson writes:
So now we know. The ACT Budget lists three new speed cameras as “revenue raising initiatives” …
I always had the silly idea that speed cameras were in place to encourage people to keep the law and to punish those who did not do so.
No wonder the public are so cynical about speed camera rules when the government is so blatantly saying it is putting in more of them to raise more money to fund its extravagant expenses. And the government is taxing property owners in Civic to raise funds for rubbish clean-up and graffiti clean-up—something the government should be attending to in any case. A fundamental task of this city and this government ought to be to attend to those matters. But, no, we are going to end up with another tax being imposed. I question the efficiency of this measure because I suspect there will be enormous legal difficulties in trying to draft legislation to tiptoe through Civic, picking and choosing who will end up paying these costs—and all for a relatively small amount of revenue. I suspect the cost of collection and the cost of meeting these requirements by business houses will prove it to be a highly inefficient tax.
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