Page 2616 - Week 12 - Thursday, 16 November 1989
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Mr Speaker, the Rally would not agree to the privatisation of Qantas or Australian Airlines, nor the Commonwealth Bank while it remains to a degree a trendsetter and a conscience setter in the home loans industry. If it were to depart from the good works it does in pulling down some of the interest rate spiral, we might revise our views.
Mr Speaker, my colleague Dr Kinloch will talk about the Liberals' proposed policy on tertiary fees, but let me refer to some of the larger proposals in the budget which will have an ACT impact with which we agree. One of them is that there are helpful policies for small business. The Rally has a good relationship with small business in the Territory, and we believe that small business will support the two-tier tax system proposed in its interests.
We also believe that a speculative gains tax, at least in the small business area, would be a fairer method than a capital gains tax. Those of us who have been associated with small business know that, after a small business operator gets a business going and three or four years down the track wants to sell it, there is a capital gain across the goodwill.
The goodwill is about all you have in terms of superannuation in small business, particularly in this troubled small business Territory. If we can protect that goodwill and leave them with some superannuation to go out on, well and good. I have seen many small business people retire poor in this Territory. We would be interested in some finetuning of that capital gains process to reflect more the aspirations of small business.
Also the Liberal Party - and this brings me onto an interesting theme, Mr Speaker - is proposing to make the top personal tax rate equal to the corporate rate. That would reduce the number of proposals to lawyers and accountants for tax avoidance schemes, I am sure, and that is a very welcome proposal from the Liberal Party.
There are a number of other comments I would like to make - I am trying to restrict them to the Territory - but one of the issues is that the middle people in Australia have lost out under the policies of the Hawke Government. Truly, one of the major problems facing the Territory is the ACT economy and whether the Hawke Government will lack credibility again in terms of what it owes the Territory, how it should be supporting the Territory and what it should do to recognise the legacy it has left us. (Extension of time granted)
Mr Speaker, the major issue affecting the Territory is interest rates, for both residential dwellers and business persons. The drift towards big business, the drift into the cigar smoke haze that the Hawke Government has shown, means that there are people suffering in this Territory. One of the economic action plan's deficiencies is, in my view, that we have not yet seen from Mr Peacock a hard-
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