Page 3222 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 21 August 2019
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stamp duty—these reforms are very significant. Pensioners who are downsizing and who are not hit with a massive stamp duty in order to move out of large properties into something more suitable for their needs in their later years benefit very significantly from these reforms. Anyone whose family increases, who has the joy of adding a new child to their family, who needs a bigger home, who has to move as a result of having more children, is paying less stamp duty as a result of these reforms.
These are the personal stories. For those whose relationships end and who, for reasons often beyond their control, are often left in a situation where they have to move out of a family home because their personal circumstances have changed, lower stamp duty means they can move into that next phase of their life without being hit with a tax of tens of thousands of dollars. These are all the personal circumstances of people who benefit from these reforms.
Tax reform is really hard. It is why no-one else is doing this. The easy path to take is the cheap, opportunistic political response of those opposite. It is what they did in 2012, it is what they did in 2016 and clearly it is what they are going to do in 2020. Reform is difficult and it is worth fighting for. (Time expired.)
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.32): As will surprise no-one, the Greens are not going to support Mr Coe’s motion. Instead, we will vote for the ALP amendment, although I must say that, as I said to the ALP, the simplest and most reasonable thing to do would be just to vote against Mr Coe’s motion. As we all know, every time this year we get this kind of motion from Mr Coe and it is basically, as Mr Barr has said, a very simplistic political attack on the Greens and the ALP. It would be really much more interesting if this was a serious attempt to consider the pluses and minuses of taxation and taxation reform, because taxation and taxation reform are really important issues.
As both previous speakers have said, it does make a difference to people how much money they have to pay in taxes and charges and who pays them. This is important work that the Assembly should be working on. Unfortunately, that is not really what Mr Coe’s motion comes to grips with. Mr Coe’s motion is disconnected from the reality of the ACT government’s taxation.
You would think from Mr Coe’s motion that the overall tax take in the ACT was outrageous compared to that in other parts of Australia. I suggest that Mr Coe should read the budget papers, and he would find that that is not the case. Actually, I am confident that Mr Coe has read the budget papers and the updates to the budget papers et cetera. If he did that, he would find, amongst other things, that that is not the case. In fact, the ACT’s own-source taxation revenue as a percentage of gross state product is towards the lower end of the pack. That is not the impression you get from Mr Coe’s speech.
Mr Coe’s motion completely misses the real issues in taxation and the funding of government services. While Mr Barr’s amendment is better, I think we need to think about the real issues that we need to be talking about. First off is: should we be increasing funding for government services, keeping it the same or cutting funding for government services, which is the only way that we could cut taxation?
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