Page 3108 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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There is another reason for not hugely increasing the charges that you have put on these businesses. You do not make much money from this. I would be interested to see what the minister says in relation to just how much money he gets in from this activity. I have heard that it is probably only several hundred thousand dollars. We are not talking big bickies. But if you encourage the ambience of Canberra—if you make it a much more pleasant experience for people to go out and have a drink or coffee, or dine outside, whatever—you will get that money back in other ways, because you will get more people using the areas.
Rather than putting unreasonable taxes on this activity, I would have thought that a simple small tax like the one you had—$21.40, going up with CPI—would not be unreasonable in the circumstances, especially given that the outdoor cafe scene is something that can comfortably be done for probably only about six months of the year in Canberra.
Unfortunately, this government has a propensity to try to tax anything that stands still for more than 10 minutes. Obviously governments have to tax, but you have to be sensible in how you do it. These increases are very unfair. These are, in many instances, businesses who Mr Mulcahy quite rightly says are in competition with the ones next door. We have more licences per head of population than any other part of Australia. It is a competitive market. These businesses are not making squillions of dollars a year; in many instances, they are struggling. They are in trouble, too, with the skill shortage and the general high employment rates we have, thanks to a very efficient federal economy. They are having difficulty getting staff. But, first and foremost, they are in competition with a lot of other businesses. They are not necessarily making huge amounts of money, and any unfair increases in taxes significantly impact on them.
The minister seems to have a somewhat troglodyte attitude in relation to this issue. This is an important part of Canberra. It has happened thanks to Gus Petersilka, who was quite a visionary and who put in a lot of effort. He was bashed from pillar to post, but finally got due recognition—long deserved—from government that having outdoor eating and outdoor seats was not such a bad idea after all. In the last 20 years, that has blossomed. It has made going to our suburban centres and our major group centres—major centres such as Civic, Belconnen, Tuggeranong and Gunghalin—a much more pleasant experience. It looks good, too. You get a good feel for a shopping centre if you see people sitting outside and enjoying themselves—eating, drinking, having a cup of coffee or whatever. To put unreasonable taxes on that is crazy. As much as anything else, I suspect that it might be false economics as well.
Unfortunately, it looks as though the government is not going to back what is a very sensible motion by Mr Smyth. I am pleased to see the attitude of the Greens on this one. It is unfortunate that again we have a government that clearly cannot get its priorities right and seems intent on hammering, especially, small businesses, which are the very lifeblood not only of Canberra but of Australia. That is all you are doing here. Small businesses have to abide by a plethora of rules, some of them quite unreasonable. We constantly get complaints about just how difficult it is for small businesses to spend so much time complying with some of the needless rules that this government puts out and about the effect that some of the taxes, especially some of the huge increases in taxes, has had on them.
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