Page 2494 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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not drive down the value of existing homes; it does not increase the price of a new dwelling, whatever it might be like; it is not going to affect the rental market. So what change will it have?
Mr Barr has just said that markets will adjust, but he failed to tell us what the effect of this tax will be and these amendments will be on the market, because if you listened to the Treasurer and Chief Minister, there is no effect. We have asked for the analysis. We have asked for more work to be done. We have asked for documents to be tabled. But the government cannot or will not. If they have not done the work, they are negligent. If they have done the work and they are hiding it because they are afraid of the effect and they do not want to reveal that to the public, that is just dishonest and, indeed, it is probably corrupt.
The problem here is that this tax must have some effect. A number of different groups have said that it should have an effect because, as Mr Barr rightly points out, all taxes have an effect. We know that; otherwise we would just have the one perfect tax in place and you could just keep upping the rate because it does not have an effect, apparently. It is nonsense. It is just nonsense.
If you are a homeowner in the inner north and you have purchased a home as your superannuation policy, your retirement nest egg, for whatever reason—something for the kids—some of it is clearly based on the idea that in the future somebody may want to redevelop this. We all say that we want to see greater density, but because we have now got a magic tax, we can tax people and still get that density, apparently. But if you are living in the inner north or you are living in a suburb closer to the city—what is it, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70—whatever the number is, it will affect the number of units that might go into a redevelopment. It must logically affect—
Mr Barr: Which planning zone it went in would affect it more, because you can’t redevelop in many planning zones.
MR SMYTH: There we go: which planning zone. But we do not have that analysis from the government; otherwise they could table it or talk to it. So we have this magic tax, and the magic tax is so good that the government is convinced it will have no effect. If the tax is so good and the legislation is so good, why have we got 17 pages of amendments from the Greens so late in the day? They talk about consultation, but there was no consultation. We were told the gist of what they would do. We did not see them until today.
Again, if the work has been done, if this two years of work had been done and done properly, why is there the need, at quarter past nine this evening, to move 17 pages of amendments in one lump? If it is such a perfect tax that the Treasurer has created, why are we doing this at all? What a wonderful tax! You can resort to your catchcries and your phrases about narrow sectional interests that the Liberals represent. I mentioned last night Menzies’s speech about the forgotten people, where you set up this straw man, you set up sides and ask: “What side are you on?” Then you demolish somebody else’s argument by saying, “You’re wrong”—the false class war.
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