Page 1435 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 11 August 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
As for the question of exercising discretion, I have no doubt that that option exists so far as the department is concerned. Whether or not they do it, however, remains to be seen. The fact is that, in my experience, even though the department have the opportunity to exercise the discretion, people do not have much faith that the department will exercise it. It is a time-consuming activity.
We all know, as the Chief Minister herself has said, that if you wish to go through the AAT to challenge the land tax it is going to cost you $240. That is probably a little below 50 per cent of the average land tax that is being levied right now by this Government. Therefore, people would think twice about whether or not they were prepared to invest that sort of money. I do not know that it would be such a sensible idea to put forward 50 per cent of the cost of your land tax on the off-chance that you might win. I suggest that, with the way the Government is approaching this question at the moment, the chances of winning are not very good.
Finally, may I say that, in answer to the question I asked earlier today, the Chief Minister has very clearly indicated that the one thing you do not do in terms of purchasing property in this city is to buy it after 1 July. You will obviously have to buy it before 1 July, or perhaps before 30 June. I do not know what that is going to do to the housing market. But it is very obvious that, if you buy a property before 1 July, you are going to be hit with the land tax; if you buy it after 1 July, presumably the seller is going to be up for it. That should lead to some very interesting situations in the marketplace. It once again demonstrates the inflexibility and the incompetence of this Government and its advisers in producing this quite iniquitous and draconian tax, as the Leader of the Opposition has said. It is certainly not social justice. It is not even equitable.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (4.11): It always causes a certain wry amusement to hear the gaggle of Tories opposite talk about social justice in relation to taxation measures. These are the people who want to tax milk and bread, who want to cut taxes on Ferraris and French champagnes, and who carry on about this being terribly inequitable because we are not giving tax breaks for people whose house is held in a family trust holding company with a unit share transaction based in the Cayman Islands. These are the people who traditionally stand for sorting out taxation to benefit the wealthy, to benefit the well-off. They are obsessed here with a tax on rental properties, on second houses, and they are quite gleefully accepting their Federal colleagues' proposition of taxing everything. We heard a lot about taxes on widows. I hope you are equally appalled at the prospect of that widow paying tax on everything she buys at the supermarket with her social security pension. With every purchase she makes she will pay tax, under your mates' proposal.
I heard a very interesting critique of this tax recently on ABC radio from Mr Jansen, who is the president of the Landlords Association and was a Liberal Party candidate some little time ago. He admitted to the ABC radio interviewer that some landlords were engaging in rorts and ruses to avoid this tax. There was one particular scheme being floated around the place whereby the renter would take some sort of sham equity in a property - a one per cent pseudo equity - so that it would no longer be a rental place and you would avoid the tax. I remind members to be very sceptical when they hear the Liberal Party talking about social injustice. We also should be sceptical because of the tales of gloom and doom they were spreading around the community last year when this tax was
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .