Page 1425 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 11 August 1992
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It is interesting also that the Chief Minister made these announcements only last Friday, one week before the tax was due and payable. Why did she do that? She did it because the Opposition indicated to her that we were going to take action to amend the Act. It was not until we did that that the Chief Minister suddenly thought, "Maybe we have a problem; maybe we had better do something". On 7 August, one week before all the payments of tax were due, recognising that the law was anomalous, the Chief Minister suddenly made some very hasty administrative decisions. The Government has a case to answer for its ineptitude and its refusal to see the lack of social justice in this Act. I am using their words; they are the people who talk about social justice. There is no social justice for many people under this Act.
I have signalled what the Opposition intends to do. We have already got some draft amendments out of the Legislative Counsel's Office. We will be revising them over the next few days and we will be putting them on the table. There are some clear inequities in this Act that need to be removed. We must relieve our citizens of the tax burden when they should not be levied the tax in the first place. There are dozens of them out there. We have a very small sample, but it is indicative of the nature and the degree of the problem.
There are people who should not be liable to the tax, but they are caught by the sheer inflexibility of this Act. We intend to make the tax burden bearable for those who are really liable for the tax. There are many retired people, superannuants, who simply do not have incomes that can carry simultaneous levying of rates and land tax. This belies the proposition put forward by Ms Follett that they want to tax commercial properties. These are not commercial properties.
There seems to be a supposition, ideological perhaps, on the part of the Government that if you own a second house you are a capitalist, you are earning massive profits, and you should be paying tax to the Government. There are many cases where people own houses not for revenue earning in the sense of supplementing their incomes but as an investment for their superannuation. What they get from the property is their only income. They are not capitalists at all; they are people who had no superannuation available to them and who made the decision that they were not going to be dependent on the old age pension. They took a prudent decision to buy a house 20 or 30 years ago. They get a small rental income from it, and this Government says, "You are a capitalist and we are going to hit you for the tax. We are not interested in your circumstances. Don't tell us about it. There is no appeal, and the Commissioner for Revenue will reject your application. Don't bother coming back and talking to us, because we don't want to know".
We intend to change the situation so that people like that do not have to pay the tax; or, if they are legally liable for it, provision will be made for them to pay it in a reasonable and sensible way, and that means instalment payments. We intend to give the Commissioner for Revenue some reasonable discretion in considering appeals. Despite what the Chief Minister said, the Commissioner for Revenue has no discretion whatsoever under the Act, except in some very specific cases. I must say that, in one or two cases where he has exercised discretion, I believe he has been unduly harsh, and I will mention one of those in a minute.
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