Page 6166 - Week 19 - Tuesday, 17 December 1991
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Because they are small clubs and cannot qualify, they are going to be hit with a 35 per cent rate of tax. These are the ethnic clubs and the sporting clubs that really are the fabric of this society when you get down to it; the clubs where the ethnic people express themselves in terms of their culture, and where individual sporting groups express themselves in terms of their special interest. This legislation is likely to put those clubs into bankruptcy because they are going to have to pick up a considerable extra tax burden.
I wonder whether this is in the interests of the community. It may well be in the interests of the Licensed Clubs Association, but I wonder whether we are not allowing the Licensed Clubs Association to be the tail that wags the dog on this issue. So, I think that there are some social consequences of this which perhaps the Government, being a government committed to social justice, may well have overlooked. I think they may need to reconsider that over the next few months. I certainly hope that they will.
The other aspect of the Bill that I want to refer to, Mr Speaker, is the cumbersome financial arrangements that are encompassed in it. If somebody paid a licence this month, on 1 January they get it back. Then we hit them with a higher rate of tax until June, to get that money back, and then on 1 July we revert to a different rate of tax. That seems to me to be an exceedingly complex administrative system that somebody has to police. Somebody has to write out the cheques, somebody then has to police the tax collections for the next six months at one rate, and then, on 1 July next year, they have to adjust the tax rate.
I cannot imagine why this very complex system of financial accounting and tax collection has been contemplated. It is said that this is revenue neutral. It may be revenue neutral in the long term, but I doubt that it is revenue neutral in this fiscal year. People who paid for their licences some time in the last three months are now going to have their fee returned to them; for six months they will repay part of that licence fee, if you like, which is included in the higher tax rate; but then the rest of it falls over into the next fiscal year. So, I do not see how it can be revenue neutral in this fiscal year. I would be interested to know what the effects are, despite the differentiated tax rates that are going to be applied, and the complexity of it, and how much expected revenue from this year, after all of this convoluted accounting takes place, is going to fall over into next year.
I think it is unnecessarily complex, and perhaps could have been dealt with in some different way. I think it is rather odd that somebody who paid for a licence in July is going to have six months' worth of his fee refunded and then it is going to be collected back from him in the next six months. He has lost the use of his money for six months. He is going to get it back, but it is going to be
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