Page 2206 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 6 June 1990
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the States and Territories lessens the likelihood of such behaviour.
A number of the measures in this Bill have been under consideration for up to a decade - they are anti-avoidance measures and tax anomalies which are easily fixed, but because of the lack of priority given to ACT related matters by Commonwealth governments this was never done.
The advent of self-government in the ACT gives us the opportunity to implement the priorities of the people of Canberra much more easily than when we were governed by the Federal Parliament. That is something we in this Assembly must all remember. We are here to implement the will of the people of Canberra. We are certainly not here to impose our will on those people.
One of the major differences between the amendments which I proposed and those in the current Bill relates to the application of stamp duties to the unearned increment in lease value which accrues as a result of a change in the terms of a lease. That is what is known in the ACT as betterment.
While I accept the Minister's statement that the Government has not proceeded with that amendment at this stage pending consideration of its proposed changes to the system of betterment tax and the planning system more generally, I would like to make one comment about it. Stamp duty is a separate tax with a separate history from betterment. The question of double taxation does not arise. The rationale for the introduction of stamp duties was both as a revenue measure and as a method of certifying a transaction. In fact, today we will be strengthening this later role by preventing unstamped documents from being used as evidence in a court.
There is no reason why stamp duty and betterment cannot use the same base, just as payroll tax and income tax do. It does concern me that there is a $1m discrepancy between the revenue estimate of the proposals I announced and those of the current Government. As I am sure that Mr Duby used, as I did, the best possible Treasury figures, it can only be assumed that there has been a significant change in the proposals. The betterment issue probably accounts for some $100,000 of this. The rest appears to be even larger concessions to the business sector.
First, it appears that, rather than apply the conveyancing rate on the sale of businesses as I proposed, the Government is only using the marketable security rate. The simple reason why marketable securities are taxed at a lower rate than conveyancing is that marketable securities such as shares are a traded commodity. They are potentially traded many times a year. Businesses, on the other hand, are not traded regularly and the practice of imposing a higher duty is therefore appropriate. This is a considerable concession. Secondly, the Government has
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