Page 1781 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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It is quite interesting that the highest in the entrepreneurial index for 2013 went to New Zealand as a nation—they obviously do not break it down to states for New Zealand—and the very last was Canberra. I think that is an interesting indication of how others see us as a place where one would come and do business.
The entrepreneurial index for 2013 had New Zealand, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Western Australia at No 8, followed by Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, South Australia at 13, Nova Scotia, Victoria at 15, New South Wales at 16, British Columbia at 17, Quebec, Queensland at 19, equal with Tasmania, the Northern Territory at 20 and the ACT at 21. The range of scores had New Zealand at 77.9 per cent and the ACT, unfortunately, at 59.1 per cent.
It is important that we have in place a framework that allows entrepreneurship, because they are the creators of wealth into the future. That is the wealth that gets taxed, that pays for hospitals, education, policemen and nurses.
We have to look at the ACT government’s unfair tax and charges regime, which hinders business growth and investment. There is no more fatal tax in the ACT at the moment than, of course, the lease variation tax, which is affecting a lot of development in this city. This is turning rapidly into Andrew Barr’s mining tax, because it promised much and it is delivering way under what it was meant to deliver.
If we look at the lease variation tax for the coming year, for 2014-15, it is now down to $14,580,000. If we look at what it was meant to deliver in 2014-15, according to the 2012-13 budget, it was meant to deliver $26,365,000 of revenue to the government. So it is not achieving what it was meant to do. All the advice from business is that it is stifling redevelopment, having regard to allowing the city to become what it should become, with a much greater population density in the centre of the city, which everybody agrees with.
Of course, you then have the commercial rates on top of that. The commercial sector did not get slugged much in the first couple of years, but they have certainly had some hefty hikes in the last couple of years, which again is affecting investment.
If we truly want to make this city work, we have to put the regime in place. We have to start with a target and, if it is a time of adversity, which I think we all know it will be, now is the time to have this discussion.
It is interesting that an article in the Canberra Times had “Canberra light rail to deliver 3,560 jobs during construction” as its title. But it did not paint such a good picture in the long term. It said:
But another 560 people will be in work as a result of development in the corridor.
So 75 will be employed on light rail, with 55 operating the line, and another 560 people will be in work as a result of the work in the corridor. It is a huge investment for so few jobs in return. What capital metro does is skew the market again. The article states:
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