Page 2498 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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empowering citizens, empowering businesses, to live their lives as they wish, to give them the choice to make the decisions we know they can make. And we know they can make those decisions much better than this government. Over the last two years, apparently, they have been concocting this tax. Yet, sure enough, at the 11th hour, they have to move a raft of amendments which they struggle to justify and struggle to have the actual data to back them up.
We heard Mr Barr earlier trying to liken this economic reform to that of the GST. It is a bit rich. It is a bit rich, on multiple levels. But the key one, I think, is that when the Howard government brought in the GST they did so on the proviso that state and territory governments would abolish taxes and that the federal government would abolish taxes. That was part of the new tax system which the federal Liberal government took to the 1998 election and which was voted on in 1999. They got rid of things like the wholesale tax, things like the excise tax. And they did many other things to avoid price exploitation. I wonder how much thought has gone into any potential price exploitation in a scheme such as this, whether it be price exploitation in the market or price exploitation within the government itself.
Obviously the government does realise that this is a cash grab. You can see so in the budget papers. You can see how the revenue is going to come in. By and large, when you look at the amount that is going to come in compared to the overall revenue of the budget, it is relatively small. But in that industry it is extremely influential and certainly will have an impact on the decisions that developers, homeowners and renters will be making in the coming years.
We have already heard from the property industry. We have already heard from the property industry that business is slowing down and that the uncertainty in the market is putting at risk many projects. In business, one of the things that you need to mitigate is risk. When it comes down to it, you take risks but you want to minimise the risks that you take. What this bill is going to do and what the amendments are also going to do is bring back considerable uncertainty into the marketplace. And if you want to get good private sector investment taking place in Canberra, good private sector investment taking place in the Canberra property market, you want to minimise the risks and you want to create certainty. And that is certainly something which is not going to happen as a result of this bill going through this place, if it does indeed do so.
We heard today that the Chief Minister is about to launch a new era of open government, which is going to strengthen government accessibility and transparency. Here we are on day zero of this new era and they have already gone against the very statements that the Chief Minister made today. We have already heard they do not have the data, they do not have the modelling, they do not have the information, to actually bring about the certainty that the market so desperately needs when it comes to making considerable investments such as those that are made in the property sector.
We also heard Mr Barr talk about market adjustments. He is soon to be the Treasurer. So the several years of pretending to sound like an economist have suddenly come to fruition. And here he is, a week away from becoming the Treasurer, and he is using his crowding out terms, he is using his market adjustment terms. But I wonder whether he actually knows what those terms mean, in particular, market adjustments.
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