Page 4155 - Week 13 - Thursday, 14 December 2006
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was also interested to hear that issue again being raised more recently and with great confidence by the Telstra representative for the ACT. I doubt very much if they would make idle threats there. Of course it has been a controversial issue, with Telstra threatening to put notices on people’s bills saying that this tax is courtesy of the ACT government.
I am concerned too that taxes like this simply serve as a great disincentive for people to come here and invest in Canberra. It is certainly a disincentive for businesses. It is a disincentive when we need to encourage people to come to Canberra. We have a skills shortage. We need to encourage business. Whilst it is nice to see so many cranes on the horizon around Canberra, the boom cannot go on forever.
It is crucially important that we encourage investment here right across the board. A charge like this is very much a disincentive for people wanting to come here. It is indicative, I think, of a government that has significantly, over a five-year period, mismanaged the economy and let its public service grow to far in excess of what it apparently would have intended if it had been keeping its eye on the ball. Clearly, it was not. It let expenditure run away with it. Now it is making a number of panicky decisions to cut back on that, and this is one of them.
There are some hidden problems in this particular bill and, it would seem, still some potential legal ones. There are certainly problems in relation to people investing in the territory. At the end of the day—because obviously it will be passed on—it is just another slug to the average Canberra punter out there in the suburbs.
MR MULCAHY (Molonglo) (11.48): I would firstly like to thank the Treasurer and his staff for their assistance in providing me with a comprehensive briefing on this bill, allowing the opposition to understand and prepare for the debate on this legislation today. The Utilities (Network Facilities Tax) Bill 2006 has been designed for the sole purpose of boosting territory revenues by imposing a new tax on network facilities that are built on land in the ACT, effective from 1 January next year.
For the purposes of implementing this tax this legislation defines “utility networks” as those used for transmitting and distributing electricity, gas, sewerage, water and telecommunications. Some of the examples of these networks include infrastructure such as powerlines, pipes and telecommunications cabling.
There are so many ways in which this legislation can be attacked that we will struggle to include them all in the time that has been allotted. I intend, therefore, to focus only on the main flaws and the Treasurer’s justification behind introducing this new tax, so that the Assembly and the people of Canberra can be made fully aware of the mistake this government is making in introducing this ill-conceived and desperately confused piece of legislation.
Let me begin by examining the arguments that have been presented by the Treasurer in the lead-up to this debate concerning the ACT government’s need to introduce this tax. Put simply, these arguments are unsound and fail to take into account all the facts. For instance, when Mr Stanhope announced his contentious decision to introduce this new tax, the Treasurer argued that the ACT needed a broader revenue base to pay for
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