Page 4582 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 31 October 2018
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MR BARR: Your analysis is very convenient because it excludes all of the real costs.
Mr Coe: If you’re a business that only pays rates then that’s the only one that’s relevant, isn’t it?
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Orr): Mr Coe.
MR BARR: No, but businesses in New South Wales will pay stamp duty, will pay insurance taxes and will pay payroll tax.
Mr Coe: If they don’t own the building, they don’t pay the stamp duty.
MR BARR: And will pay all of those taxes that are not levied in the ACT. Any like-for-like comparison shows that the ACT system is both economically more efficient and fairer, and ensures that the tax burden to fund the grandiose schemes that Mr Coe referred to is shared. Health care, public health care, public education, community services, public housing, public transport, and all of those things that Mr Coe hates and does not believe that government has a role in providing; that is what fundamentally is at play here.
Mr Coe wants smaller government. He is a redneck conservative. He is the only political leader in this country to oppose marriage equality, the only political leader in this country who is seriously advocating for a return to higher stamp duties, to put taxes back on insurance products, because he cannot come to terms with a more efficient, fairer and progressive taxation system, which is what we are moving towards.
We have been progressively implementing this over the past six years. Our tax reforms have been endorsed by every serious economist and every serious review of the Australian tax system, including, again this week, by the Grattan Institute. His own former leader, Malcolm Turnbull, is on the public record on more than one occasion indicating that this was the right policy direction. The current Prime Minister and former Treasurer has also made similar public statements. So he is out of step with prevailing public policy development and economic opinion in relation to the best way to raise revenue.
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time, that this Assembly has debated tax reform. In fact it has been a constant theme over the past seven years. Nevertheless, in spite of motions like this seeking to stall, stymie and reverse important economic reforms, we have continued this important reform process for our economy, for our city’s future and for revenue certainty, in order to be able to provide the services that this growing community needs.
This is the choice, in the end, Madam Assistant Speaker, as it was in 2012 and 2016, and undoubtedly will be again in 2020: do you support the simplest, fairest and most efficient form of tax revenue collection for the territory or do you not? Do you believe that government should provide essential health, education, community, municipal and emergency services, and public transport provision? Do you believe
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