Page 2092 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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Our citizens enjoy the highest quality public services. They have sent a very clear message through the ballot box on countless occasions—most recently, only two weeks ago—that they want public services from government. They want us to invest in health, education, social infrastructure, public transport and all of the things that make this city a great place to live.
That is why the budget that we delivered yesterday focuses on those core priorities. There is more funding for schools, more teachers, more teacher assistants, more nurses, more doctors, more police officers, more firefighters—more people who go to work every day to make our lives better. We are supporting those people and our growing communities by making these investments.
On the specific issue of tax reform, we look very carefully at how the ACT ranks according to the ABS against all of the other Australian states and territories. The ABS have clearly indicated, through their most recent data, that our tax per capita is almost spot on the Australian average. It is lower than in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia.
The government’s tax reforms have seen the phasing out of stamp duty—to be abolished for first homebuyers from 1 July. Each year, stamp duty has been cut. The savings now are towards the tens of thousands of dollars on average properties. The individual stamp duty rates per property see tens of thousands of dollars in savings. If we had left the stamp duty rates where they were, stamp duty would be raking in half a billion dollars in revenue, if not more.
We have abolished taxes on insurance products, phased out stamp duties, raised the payroll tax free threshold, and shifted our revenue base away from taxing capital and labour towards the simplest, fairest and most efficient form of revenue raising available to state and territory governments: through our rating system. That is the simplest, fairest and most efficient way. Why? Because it means that we all contribute each year to the services that we all consume.
When someone in your family has had a heart attack and needs an ambulance to get them to hospital and get treatment, you will care about that investment in health services. That is the thing that will matter to you the most. If you have kids in a school or you are a student in one of our schools, what matters to you is that we have a quality teacher in the classroom and the school is properly resourced. That matters to people. If you are working in community services to assist the most vulnerable, your organisation needs to be properly funded. That is what matters to people.
That is the other side of the equation—the community, the human side of the equation—that you never hear about from the Leader of the Opposition. You never hear that. They are not interested in the services that government provides to communities. They never have been. It is not in the DNA of the Liberal Party to care about that. It is all about investors and their relative rate of returns. It is all about that sort of stuff and never about people. It is never about the essential services that the community relies upon government to deliver.
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