Page 2167 - Week 10 - Thursday, 26 October 1989
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Let us look at what else it is doing: 1988-89, $6.9m in land tax; 1989-90, $12.9m in land tax. The Government is forcing businesses across the border and it is dissuading others who would otherwise come here from making that decision and moving to the ACT. Yet the Chief Minister had the hide, when talking to the Rotary Club of Canberra, Burley Griffin branch, on 17 August to mouth these sweetly reassuring words. Are you leaving, Chief Minister?
Ms Follett: Yes, I am.
MR HUMPHRIES: Oh, dear; you will have to read it in Hansard. These sweetly reassuring words were used: "The local economy is receiving purposeful and well directed assistance which will enhance the ability of local firms to compete in national markets". That is empty rhetoric - totally empty rhetoric.
Mr Speaker, the Government does not seem to have realised quite what it is doing in this regard. It has to create, as I have said, positive incentives for people to come to the ACT. That may mean, of course, on some occasions deliberately undercutting the amount of tax it collects in order to create a directly comparable advantage between the ACT, for example, and New South Wales.
Mr Hehir, from whom I quoted before, is quoted in the same press article as saying, "If the ACT abolished the tax, we would be the only State to do so". I can almost hear the alarm in his voice. I refer members to the occasion some years ago when the Government of Queensland abolished death duties in that State. What happened, of course, when that occurred - and members better informed than I am will correct me if I am wrong - was that a great many business and other arrangements were restructured to relocate in Queensland because death duties were not imposed in that State. In fact, what happened in due course was that every other State in the Commonwealth abolished death duties because the Queensland Government had created an incentive which other States could not match.
Why could we not think about doing the same thing for ACT business? Why could we not think about doing the sorts of things here that would broaden our tax base, even though it meant some loss of revenue in the short term? I would argue that, on the Government's own rhetoric, it ought to be examining just that.
I do not necessarily support the immediate abolition of payroll tax in the Territory. Clearly, that would not be possible. But the Government certainly ought not to be widening the payroll tax net. It certainly ought to be examining ways of relieving the tax burden in all forms on business.
I want to quote from a document that CARD issued, a budget blueprint, in February this year, in which they indicated their views on payroll tax. They make quite a good case.
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