Page 4101 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 18 November 2015

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(ii) general rates increases and the cost of living impact on ACT households and businesses; and

(b) table this in the Assembly before the 2016-2017 ACT Budget.

A very important issue for people is the rates they pay, not just for where they live but for the businesses they work in. This is a community now that is coming to find the truth about the government’s rates reform, which is that it is just a grab for cash. The startling revelation that the government is now reneging on its promise to phase out stamp duty to instead become the lowest charging jurisdiction on stamp duty will cause dismay among many people, particularly as they are bearing the pain of the enormous increases in rates that they have suffered over the past three years where we have seen on average a 45 per cent increase in the household rates people are paying.

Indeed, similar stories have emerged in people’s businesses. Last time we had this debate I quoted a business in Fyshwick that had seen a 48 per cent increase in their rates, yet no additional service. They are no better off; they are simply paying more to a government that has not been able to manage its finances and are using the word “progressive”. Read “progressive” here as giving certainty to government, not to the taxpayer. What we face is a situation where the government has made commitments; it is on a path, but it cannot tell us when that path will be completed and it cannot tell us what the milestones on that path are. But the guarantee that certain taxes would disappear—particularly conveyancing charges—has now gone out the window.

It is time that we that we took stock of what this means. My motion today calls on the government to conduct some impact analysis on the general rates increases and what their financial impacts have meant for ACT’s households and the businesses that they own and work in. We then need to look at what that translates into also in cost of living impacts on both households and how that may affect how businesses are performing in the ACT. If taxpayers have less money, they are not going to the businesses to spend.

This is an important issue. The government looked down the eye of the camera at the last election and said, “We won’t triple your rates,” and yet we all know that rates are well and truly on their way to tripling. We have seen the general 45 per cent average increase across the board over the past couple of years. We saw that consolidated revenue showed a $36 million general rates revenue gouge. It just keeps going up and up, but the trade-offs are not happening to the extent that the government said they would.

What we have to have, though, is some certainty for taxpayers and Canberra home owners and businesses. They already pay some of the highest general rates in the country. If we do the comparison with Queanbeyan, particularly for commercial rates, businesses are looking across the border and saying, “Well, it’s a lot cheaper to operate there than it is in the ACT”.

What we have to do is tackle housing affordability and cost of living pressures. It is the Canberra Liberals that are committed to that; not this government. We have seen over the past 15 years that all the government does is simply take the revenue from land and then squander it. The problem for the government is that we all know that the amount of available land is finite. Bureaucrats have put various estimates—one told me 12 to 15 years and another one said 20 years—on when all the usable land will be gone. Then


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