Page 2896 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 September 2006
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a detailed report from Mr Stefaniak on the radio on the Monday morning following the love fest. What did he have to say? He was asked what advice the Prime Minister provided to the love-in. He was asked why the Liberal Party is in opposition in every state and territory and what the PM had asked the Liberals to do. Mr Stefaniak said, “We have to get some policies. We have to come up with good policies to combat incumbent governments.”
What are these policies? The only one the Leader of the Opposition could come up with on the radio that morning, after a weekend with the Prime Minister, was the abolition of pay parking at Canberra’s hospitals. The only policy in their fiscal armoury is to abolish pay parking. The only policy to come out of a whole weekend with the leader of their federal party, the Prime Minister of Australia, was to abolish pay parking at hospitals. How incredible!
This government has demonstrated its record for sound budgetary management and has delivered surpluses on an Australian Accounting Standards basis over the last four years, even after making significant investments in critical areas neglected by previous governments, such as disability services, emergency services, child protection and mental health. The ACT does not have a record as a high taxing jurisdiction, as indicated by the Commonwealth Grants Commission and the ABS. The burden of territory taxation on the people of the ACT is not over and above that experienced by people in other states.
In recent years the ACT has not been raising revenue at a sufficient rate to support the services the community expects. In 2004-05, according to the Commonwealth Grants Commission, the ACT had a taxation effort around the national average, with a total taxation assessed revenue-raising effort of 100.27 per cent. The taxation revenue figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in ABS catalogue No 5506 released on 29 March 2006 show that per capita state and local taxes in the ACT were 11 per cent lower than the average of all states and territories.
The most recent available figures show that the ACT takes relatively less tax per person today than it did in 2000 and 2001. In 2000-01, the ACT per capita taxation was the third highest behind New South Wales and Victoria and almost on par with the average for all states and territories. In 2004-20, the ACT was the third lowest at around $270 per capita lower than the average. Over the four-year period between 2000-01 and 2004-05, the ACT had the lowest increase in taxation revenue of all states and territories at nine per cent. In all other Australian jurisdictions per capita taxation increased by between 11 and 43 per cent.
The ACT is the only jurisdiction that had a decrease in per capita taxation between 2003-04 and 2004-05. While per capita taxation in the ACT decreased by six per cent, every other jurisdiction had an increase ranging between two per cent and 16 per cent. It is worth mentioning again that the commonwealth government is the highest taxing jurisdiction in Australia, and its share of total taxation is still increasing. A useful measure in this case is the proportion of taxation relative to the gross domestic product, the size of the national economy.
Taxation revenue for the commonwealth increased from 25 per cent of GDP in 2003-04 to 25.7 per cent of GDP in 2004-05, and GST revenue was only a small part of this.
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