Page 2165 - Week 10 - Thursday, 26 October 1989
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for you to do everything you needed to do about payroll tax". And now it expects the Assembly to rush through this piece of legislation.
Clearly, members of the community are not happy with the degree of consultation that has occurred, and clearly the Assembly is entitled to more time, but it is obviously not going to get it. If it had been introduced at the beginning of August, the Government would have saved some $600,000 - in fact, if you use Dubynomics, $800,000 - but that is not to be. Mr Speaker, payroll tax is, in many respects, a very unfortunate kind of tax. It reduces the competitive edge of ACT business. We add to the burdens of business in attempting to generate wealth for this Territory. The Deputy Chief Minister yesterday, I think, said, "The imposition of payroll in the Territory was not a disincentive to business coming to the ACT". That may be the case, but it certainly is not an incentive to come here, and should we not be looking to see whether the way in which tax structures exist in this Territory create incentives for business to come here? For goodness sake, do we not need that?
This is a bad time to be exploring avenues of the kinds this Government is presently exploring. I want to quote from that excellent publication Trends, put out by the Civic Advance Bank, which the Government constantly quotes from and constantly holds up as a good reflection of what is going on in this Territory. In the August edition, it says this about the ACT's economy, under the heading "ACT's Economy Marks Time":
The economic outlook suggests that the Territory's revenue base may be significantly at risk in 1990-91 due to: relatively slow growth in ACT payroll tax collections -
and listen to these words -
(as employment growth slows over the course of 1989-90).
But they are not saying there that payroll tax collections are slowing because the employers are finding ways out, because employers are avoiding their responsibilities. They are pointing out there, very clearly, that employment growth is slowing; and employment growth is slowing because, among other reasons, the burden on business is getting greater. The burden on business, particularly after this most recent budget, is so much greater that it is quite understandable that employment growth should slow in the Territory. If we are lucky, that will be the only thing that slows in the Territory. It probably will not be.
Stamp duty collections will also fall, according to this publication. The Government seems to ignore that fact. Let us look at the existing position of businesses in the
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