Page 2345 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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first home buyers on revenue. This is how he has achieved his surplus. It is not through the supposedly courageous reforms that have torn the heart out of many communities in the ACT. It is through punishing people through taxation, which, of course, is administered by the Treasury, which we are discussing here in part 1.5.
The Stanhope government is the government of more taxes. Indeed, most of the initiatives it has put forward since it has been in office have failed and have had to be withdrawn. They have been shown to be faulty. As I will point out in my speech, perhaps a few of the taxes it has proposed this time are also in that category. However, with a majority government, you can do just about whatever you want. It is a government of more taxes, as well as a government of extracting relatively lots more revenue from the long-suffering community. This flies in the face of the speech that the Chief Minister gave when he was then Leader of the Opposition, when he said: “We want to be a low-taxing government. We know that low taxing governments are good for the economy.”
So, in contrast to what he said in opposition, this is the Chief Minister who has attempted in every one of his budgets to drive up taxation. When he was in opposition—indeed, on 28 April 1998 in his inaugural speech to this place—he said he believed in diversifying the base to lift the tax burden that is administered by the Department of Treasury, which, of course, is line 1.5 in this budget. It is something that has not happened. He laments it. He is sad about it, but he has done nothing to relieve the burden of taxation. In fact, he has added to the burden of taxation with a raft of property taxes this year. The windfall gain is not a windfall at all. It is just extreme taxation from this Chief Minister.
We then go on to things like utilities tax—a tax that has not been put in place anywhere in the country. It is a tax that is not necessary. It is just an impost that is simply another means of extracting revenue from the ACT taxpayers, nothing more and nothing less—except, in this case we will hide it. We will not put it on your rates bill or somewhere, we will put it on everybody else’s bill so you can blame the gas utility or the electricity utility that you use. We see this revenue rolling in to the Department of Treasury and it is the Chief Minister who is doing it.
There are two new taxes, a tax on duty deferred by new home buyers and the victim services tax. Whilst looking after victims is a good thing, these silly proposals involve hypothecation. Each new tax is poor policy. It is inefficient, it is small and it contradicts the spirit of the IGA, the intergovernmental agreement, to reduce these sorts of small nuisance taxes. Again, the Chief Minister, as Treasurer—as we discuss the Department of Treasury—wants to reverse history. He wants to go back to small-minded, inefficient taxes instead of broadening the tax base and finding streams of income that grow and are sustainable into the future. So at the heart of it the Chief Minister, the Treasurer, has got his taxation and his treasury policy wrong.
We also have a re-described revenue raising measure called the energy industry tax imposed on all utilities. It is in budget paper No 3, page 39, and it replaces previous charges imposed on utilities. In general we should describe revenue-raising measures as taxes, for that is what they are, irrespective of the names you want to put on them to disguise them. It is also important to note that the rate-free threshold is being phased out by 2010-11. So that brings properties with lower UAVs into the rates nets,
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