Page 3246 - Week 11 - Thursday, 12 September 1991
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QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Land Tax
MR KAINE: I address to the Chief Minister and Treasurer a question in connection with her statement this morning relating to the Rates and Land Tax (Amendment) Bill, and I refer to two comments in that statement. The first is that the Treasurer expects that landlords may pass on some of the cost to their tenants, and this could be $4 to $5 a week. Later on she says that Commissioner for Housing properties are excluded from this. Given those two statements, how can the Treasurer justify the creation on a statutory basis of a special class of landlord and a special class of tenant, excluding those people from the effects of this new tax? Secondly, if you consider that the occupants of Housing Trust properties ought to be protected from the consequences of this tax, what are you going to do to compensate low income earners in private rental accommodation, who also have to pick up the cost and will not have the protection offered by the Act for this special class of tenant you have now created?
MS FOLLETT: The first thing to say about the Bill I introduced this morning is that it is not providing for a new tax; it is an extension of an existing tax. In the ACT at the moment people who have property for commercial purposes pay land tax and they pay it at the rate of one per cent on the unimproved capital value. We are seeking to extend that existing tax to a class of property holders who earn income on their properties because they have them rented out for residential purposes, as opposed to having them for a shop or office or some other commercial purpose. So, it is not right to say that it is a new tax; it is an existing tax, the base for which is being extended. It is also the case that every State and, indeed, the Northern Territory charge a land tax on rental properties; so again we are not doing anything that is very much out of the ordinary.
Mr Kaine has drawn attention to the particular case of Commissioner for Housing properties. He has quite properly drawn attention to that, because obviously people who are in Commissioner for Housing accommodation will not be subject to this tax in the way that people in private accommodation may be if their landlord chooses to pass it on to them. The reason for that is very simple. In the case of Housing Trust properties it would more or less be a case of the Government taxing itself. It would be possible to do that, but it would be very much a book entry. As Treasurer, I would have to increase the appropriation to the Housing Trust in order to pay myself that tax. It would be administratively a fairly cumbersome procedure and one that is not warranted.
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