Page 3575 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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There is also no provision for payment of this tax in instalments, particularly for the sorts of landlords that I have just been referring to. Members may recall that I have spoken in the past in this place about the need to provide opportunities for normal ratepayers to receive the discount on their quarterly rate payments. There are not too many people out there at the bottom end of the market who are in a position to make use of the discount that is offered, because, quite frankly, they can afford to pay their rates only in instalments and they have enough problems as it is in doing that. Once again, I reiterate my call for the Government to consider - and I made the same call to the Alliance Government at the time - allowing the 5 per cent discount to apply to the quarterly payments.
Where is the social justice in the current system, when only those who have the ways and means to pay the figure in one instalment can in fact obtain that benefit? It is a benefit that is being made available only to a limited part of our community. It may well be that the extension of this albeit small discount leads to a reduced cost of enforcement, and savings would come to the Government in that way. I would encourage the Government to take up that initiative. Failing that, a Rally led administration in the ACT Assembly would be seeking to move along that path.
The system that we have here in relation to the Rates and Land Tax (Amendment) Bill, particularly in relation to the amount of discretion that will be allowed to the commissioner, will, I believe - and my colleague Mr Collaery believes - provide a boon for lawyers under the system of appeal to the AAT. As is freely acknowledged, it is not the landlord who will pay the costs, because they will be tax deductible.
So, of course, they are going to appeal, and that is going to have a considerable effect, I believe, on the cost structure of the Revenue Office in terms of having to meet and comment on all the various appeals that I believe will come through. I think that is, unfortunately, one of the problems that the Government may have to look at, and it may be that it will have to look very carefully at the budget for the Revenue Office because of that.
It seems to me, and my colleagues within the Rally, that what the Government has failed to do, in its bandaid approach to this budget, is consider and examine the overall structure of land taxing and rating in the ACT. What we have here is a quick-fix, ideological attempt to raise money, without actually going into and looking at the overall money raising factor for the municipal budget. It is another example of what I believe is this Alice in Wonderland Treasurer that we have in the ACT. I think that, by the time we get around to the next election, people will see that the budget that we have just passed on to the Estimates Committee has a degree of Alice in Wonderland thinking about it as well.
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