Page 2162 - Week 10 - Thursday, 26 October 1989
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additional 1 per cent to that 5 per cent tally. I think that that is worth bearing in mind because it shows fairly clearly why it is that this Government has succumbed to the temptation to seek extra funding from this source.
Being the largest single bucket at the disposal of most State governments, this Government, like those, must in some ways be tempted to view it as a fairly easily accessible bucket of money and indeed business as a fairly easy target for additional taxation. I think Mr Kaine described it as "a bottomless well". But the fact is that it is not, Mr Speaker.
Business, like any other legitimate generator of wealth in our community - and, after all, business is the biggest single generator of wealth - needs to operate in an environment where it can be fairly certain of the burdens that are to be placed on it by society and it needs to operate in an environment which encourages it to continue to do what it is there to do; that is, generate wealth. Measures of this kind which increase the burdens on business have to be looked at suspiciously.
We are perfectly entitled to ask, as members of this place, whether or not it is justified for any government to place an additional burden on business, particularly, as I am going to outline shortly, when the environment of the ACT's economy is such that we should be looking at removing burdens from business rather than placing them on business.
In the course of this debate there have been many references to loopholes. I see that Mr Grant Hehir made a statement on behalf of the Government in the Canberra Times on 21 October where he referred to the Bill "closing loopholes in the current legislation which have allowed employers not to pay the tax". Mr Duby referred to loopholes and so did the Chief Minister. This is an old furphy. Let us face it; any desire by government to catch those who legally structure their business to minimise tax are described as people exploiting loopholes.
We all, in a sense, exploit loopholes of this kind to minimise our taxation. Every one of us engages in tax minimisation of varying sorts. Even members of the Government, I am sure, do that. Yet to take advantage of tax laws to ensure that one pays less tax by structuring one's affairs so that does not happen does not necessarily mean that one is cheating. What the Minister for Housing and Urban Services said about running to our accountants and asking them to find ways around the laws is an insult to those people who want to take advantage of the existing framework of the law to ensure they comply with the law.
As well as having insulted doctors and lawyers in this house today - I think that was the other Minister's responsibility - we are taking accountants in as well. We are going through all of them. At this rate we will probably get onto academics next.
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