Page 2994 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Order, members! The volume is starting to go up; how about it goes down? Bring it down to a low roar.
MR SESELJA: Thank you for bringing the Treasurer to order, Mr Assistant Speaker.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: That is a two-way sword, thank you, Mr Seselja. Both of you.
MR SESELJA: So, apparently, we are hearing now, they were not actually asking for $50,000 on units in Braddon. They were not asking for $100,000 tax on dual occupancies in Narrabundah or O’Connor. They were not asking for the $30,000-odd tax.
Ms Gallagher: So you think we should give it away, Mr Seselja?
MR SESELJA: I generally take the principle that we need taxation but it should be reasonable. That would be my general starting point. Ms Gallagher’s position seems to be “we will tax absolutely as much as we can possibly get away with”. That is what these tables reflect. If you were to dream up what would be the most possible tax anyone could imagine for one individual tax measure on a property, I am thinking that $100,000 from the ACT government would be right up there. I do not think that anyone would have said, “Yes, maybe $1 million or maybe $10 million.” Most people would say: “$100,000 is an extraordinary amount of tax for one unit. That is an extraordinary amount of tax for one dual occupancy—or $50,000 in Braddon per unit, for a block of units.”
So the Treasurer’s position seems to be: “We are in a bit of a pickle; we can’t control our spending. We haven’t really got the departments to actually do that.” They cannot actually tell us what their internal budgets are yet. We go through the QONs—I am sure Mrs Dunne, when she has the opportunity to speak, will go through some of those unanswered QONs. We have got unanswered QONs right across the board. The LDA can tell us—hats off again to the LDA for their work—but not so much the other departments.
So the question would be again for the Treasurer: was she interested in finding out how they are spending our money? Was she interested in actually getting savings? Was she interested in balancing the budget? No, because she had this cunning plan to slap a massive new tax on houses. The question again would be: what will be the impact of levying a tax of upwards of $50,000 per unit on the shape of our city? How will that encourage people to invest, to take risks, to build the accommodation that we need—in our city centre and around our town centres in particular? We often hear about an accommodation crisis in Canberra. I want to see a range of accommodation provided. I want to see both the private and the public sector providing good quality accommodation. I want to see community sector delivery.
Every year at the beginning of the student year we hear about the shortages of accommodation and the need for more, about the exorbitant rents that many people have to pay as a result. The questions will be: how will this help that situation? How will this large massive tax on homes—on houses—help that situation? How will that
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