Page 2163 - Week 10 - Thursday, 26 October 1989
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Mr Kaine: All professionals are crooks?
Mrs Grassby: No. Academics are pay-as-you-earn taxpayers. They do not have tax lurks.
Mr Jensen: What about real estate agents?
Mrs Grassby: Yes, let us get into them next.
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR HUMPHRIES: I think we can only deal with a certain number of professions in one day. We might leave the others for other days.
Mr Kaine: It will be engineers next.
MR HUMPHRIES: Engineers, yes. So, Mr Speaker, I reject the kind of logic the Government applies to this idea of loopholes. It is interesting that a number of unintended consequences are also caught by this kind of loophole-closing. As yet I have heard no explanation, or even an attempt at an explanation, from Government members as to how they are going to deal with situations beyond the ones that they so colourfully characterise as being the ones that this Bill is out to catch. The sorts of instances that were mentioned by Mr Kaine in his speech include the idea of an employment agency used by an employer being deemed to be paying wages.
This is not what the Government has been talking about when its members have been making outrageous claims about this legislation. What unintended consequences are there that we have not been told about, and what information have those that are going to be affected by this been given about this kind of change to the law? This is going to be, if the Government gets its way, operative in a few days' time. It is 26 October. The Bill will be gazetted, I imagine, in time to be operative from 1 November, only five days away. This is broadening the scope of the existing payroll tax quite extensively. What steps has the Government taken to ensure that all those who might be affected by this know that they are going to be hit for more tax in five days' time? Of course, if they had not rushed in and picked up from the table here a copy of the budget initial statement back on 26 July they have only got themselves to blame, says the Government. I think that that argument speaks for itself.
Mr Berry: Their representatives were involved in it.
MR HUMPHRIES: You represent everybody in this Territory, Mr Berry, not just the unions or the workers, or the lower class, as Mrs Grassby describes them.
Let us look at the other interesting argument. New South Wales does this, they tell us. I find it very interesting
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