Page 4620 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 27 November 1990
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MR STEVENSON: I agree that it is a bad tax, Craig. I am saying that they all are. A lot of people in business have a great number of small transactions. This money is not profit; it is not money that they are able to keep. It is what they get in to try to cover all the things they need to pay out. What do they need to pay out? Mainly, above all other things, they need to pay out taxes - payroll taxes, stamp duty taxes, income taxes and business taxes. We all know that I could be here for five minutes listing them.
Sooner or later, people in government will have to realise that the business community particularly, the people who create the wealth in our society, are not an inexhaustible resource of money for governments so that they can go on spending it. We have to do something about it. Were it not for the fact that the tax is a bad tax overall, one suggestion is that it would be a good idea for businesses to be put on the same footing as the government, and not have the government being exempt from all the onerous taxes and other matters - as I brought up in the Assembly the other day in relation to motor vehicles. Businesses have to pay out again, and again, and again.
In this town you can drive around any day of the week and you will find "Closed down" signs or "Closing down" signs. In such a wonderful, vibrant town, when people want to work, when people are perfectly happy to run enterprise businesses and work very hard to supply the services and products that people want, how on earth can we have all these businesses going down?
The greatest imposition of the lot is taxes levied by the government. The sooner we stop it, the better. After all, why is it that government has to spend the money? Who in their right mind would suggest that a government can spend the money better than the person who earned it? It is going to be spent either way. Why is it suggested that governments have to do it? Why cannot people be allowed to spend their own money? They are not going to hoard it away. They will keep it circulating. I believe absolutely that they will do a far better job than people who have not earned it, who have not the same concern about spending it - that is, members of parliament - robbing the rich and giving to the poor.
One of the other major points about this particular Bill is that it is being passed so rapidly. It is an appalling situation in a parliament - this and any other - that Bills are introduced and passed within a week. I recall a rather amazing situation when a Bill that was passed in this Assembly after five weeks - members know what Bill I mean - was hounded from pillar to post as being rushed through the Assembly; yet that was a five-week Bill.
We have had Bills passed in this Assembly in one day, two days, five days and so on. This is not okay. Unless a Bill can be shown to be urgent - and the urgency matter
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