Page 229 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 2018
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fair, that somehow this is a more efficient tax system, and therefore we have to give up all opposition and just support it.
We do not accept that. We have fought against this rates regime at every single opportunity. The Canberra Liberals have been the only party in this place that have voted against it on each occasion since 2012. Unfortunately, the only reason that we have this rates regime, the only reason that we have this unfair unit and apartment tax, is that the Labor Party and the Greens frequently use their numbers to ram things through.
It is not good enough to say that there are unintended consequences here. All these were foreshadowed. In 2012 the Canberra Liberals famously took to an election that Labor would triple rates. Sure enough, within 10 years, that is exactly what is going to happen. Last year, when the government changed this methodology for how apartments and units would have their rates calculated, we raised that concern again. We raised the concern about bumping people up into the top threshold rather than being in the lowest marginal threshold. We said the impact would be severe and we voted against it. Meanwhile, the Labor Party and the Greens once again voted together and rushed it through.
The impact has been severe. The impact has been that thousands of people have seen a huge increase in their cost of living, yet they have not seen a commensurate increase in the services provided. There are two threshold questions that need to be asked. Firstly, when your rates increase by such a huge amount, can you afford it? And even if you can afford it, the second question is: are you getting value for money? On the first question, there are tens of thousands of people that cannot afford it. On the second question, the answer is universally no: people are not getting better services as a result of this staggering increase.
When you look at the tax reform from 2012 to 2017 for the applicable areas of the budget, you see it going from $667 million to $895 million, with an anticipated figure of $1.1 billion by 2021. It is astonishing. At the same time, the government have been receiving record revenue from the commonwealth. In this financial year alone, in the last eight months they received $66 million more than expected from the commonwealth. They anticipated a budget in May. It got passed in August. In that short amount of time, the commonwealth government have given an additional $66 million, yet this government still needs to slug people more and more. It is outrageous.
I also think that the government is doing a disservice to Ted Quinlan, the author of the reform package. Importantly, one of his recommendations in the reform package was that the changes be brought in gradually and be grandfathered for those who had already paid stamp duty. Conveniently, the government ignored that recommendation. The impact this has had has been extraordinary.
Some of the petitioners have joined us today, not because they like politics, and not because they find the Assembly particularly interesting, but because they are representative of the thousands of Canberrans who think this is unfair. And it is. This
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