Page 1424 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 11 August 1992
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have no intention of considering this matter in the light of their so-called social justice principles. The legislation was flawed when it was introduced in the first place, and we would have defeated it on the floor of the house, I submit, had we been given more than three days to consider it.
The Chief Minister said earlier that such a tax exists in the States. Of course it does. But, once you step across the border into Queanbeyan, you have to own property the collective UCV of which adds up to $170,000 before you pay even one cent of land tax. Here it counts from the very first dollar. Sadly, at the time the Bill was debated we could not get sufficient statistics, even from the Revenue Office - to give them credit, they did their best - to show what would be the effects of applying some sort of threshold. The legislation was flawed from the outset, and since then innocent people, people who should not be subjected to this tax, have been caught in the net.
There is another flaw in the legislation relating to the Commissioner for Revenue. Despite the assertion by the Chief Minister and Treasurer only a few minutes ago that the Commissioner for Revenue has discretion, the Act gives him no discretion whatsoever. If the Commissioner for Revenue has been exercising discretion under this Act, I would like to know under what provision of the Act he is doing it. Is there some ministerial direction? Is there a ministerial determination? Is there a regulation under the Act that we do not know about? The Act gives the Commissioner for Revenue no discretion.
To give him his due, the Commissioner for Revenue has been implementing the terms of the Act implicitly, and as a public servant you have to give him credit for doing that. But what have the results been? Appeals against unreasonable levying of the tax have been rejected, because he has no discretion to do otherwise. Unsuccessful appellants have been told, as is their right, to go to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal; but many of them do not have the resources to do it. After paying this tax, paying their rates and paying everything else that they are subjected to, they simply do not have the money that is required to go to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and have their cases heard.
There was considerable public concern about the tax one year ago, when it was introduced. That is why I asked the Chief Minister earlier when the Government had suddenly been struck with the notion that there were flaws in this Act. One year ago, when the Bill was first introduced, we received a lot of information, a lot of case studies, which indicated that on the face of it these people should not have been levied. Yet here we are, a year later, and the Government has done nothing to amend the Act. Even on the basis of what has happened in the last two or three weeks, they still have not moved to amend the Act, although the Chief Minister herself acknowledges that the law is defective.
To come up today with some administrative arrangements that bypass the Act, which can be changed just as easily tomorrow as they were last Friday, and to claim that that is a solution to the problem, that the anomalies in the Act have been fixed, is a fantasy. Nothing in the Act has been fixed by the Government; all the flaws that have existed for the last year still remain. An administrative decision to bypass the process of amending the law to get rid of those anomalies is not good enough.
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