Page 1438 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 11 August 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
more reasonable to tax the earning of income, but not the potential to earn income. When we say that the land tax will be levied on rental properties which are not the principal place of residence of the owner, the key word is "rental". Many of these places are not rental properties, and to impose this tax on them is not fair, it is not just, and it does not encourage people to look after themselves and their families. Someone may buy a property, instead of taking out superannuation, to look after their old age. I have thought about that. You could live in one half and rent out the other half, to make sure that you did not need to take a pension and other things like that. Is this to be commended and encouraged, or is it to be penalised? I think these are unintended consequences; nevertheless there are many cases.
It has also been suggested that the tax has not discouraged people from owning rental properties. It has to. When you penalise people, it simply has to discourage them from buying rental properties in the ACT. It may not discourage them from buying them in Queanbeyan or elsewhere. So, overall it may not discourage people, but we are talking about the ACT. There are clearly problems with this legislation. We need to look at why this has come about. There are unintended consequences. Why do we have unintended consequences of legislation? Mr Kaine referred to the problem earlier: The Bill was put through rapidly. There was not time to look at the situation of a threshold. Would there be a benefit from a threshold in Canberra? Would that cause major problems with the revenue? Mr Kaine said that he was not able to have the time to make that determination.
We truly need to be concerned about how rapidly we put legislation through. An article on page 3, I think it is, of today's Canberra Times points out that it would be a good idea for the House of Representatives to put all legislation through a committee, to ensure that there are not unintended consequences of that legislation. What a good proposal that is. However it is done, it should be done. One of the ways in which it should be done is to allow us all enough time to debate the issues. It takes a long time. Even two or three months is not by any means too long to have a good look at legislation that can have unintended consequences that either inconvenience or gravely concern people.
I commend the Chief Minister for looking to handle some of the problems, but I ask whether they needed to happen in the first place. One point the Chief Minister mentioned was that we needed to look at the consequences of changing the one-year payment in advance, which could mean the loss of $600,000. Some people might think the consequence would be a saving of $600,000 by people in the community.
Some 70 per cent of people initially opposed this legislation, according to our polling. So there are many people that are concerned about it. I think they would be particularly concerned about the anomalies we have heard about today. Is there any suggestion that we have heard about the lot? Of course not. There must be dozens and dozens of people worrying. Mr Kaine mentioned earlier the simultaneous imposition of land tax and rates - - -
Ms Follett: That has been changed.
MR STEVENSON: The Chief Minister says that that has been changed, and that is excellent. Let us say that we are talking only about those people that have made commercial decisions. They want to make money from owning properties.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .