Page 1808 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 19 August 1992
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RATES AND LAND TAX (AMENDMENT) BILL (NO. 2) 1992
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (10.53): Madam Speaker, I present the Rates and Land Tax (Amendment) Bill (No. 2) 1992.
Title read by Clerk.
MR KAINE: I move:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
Madam Speaker, this legislation clearly is not the Liberal Party's preferred course of action in respect of land tax. I have made the point before that in government we would move to repeal the tax on privately owned residential property. However, in opposition, we are limited to seeking amendments to the Act to ensure that at least it is applied justly and with a social conscience.
It is, I believe, a matter of concern that the Government has failed to address the deficiencies in its own legislation and has turned its face away from the legitimate requests from reasonable people to have their grievances heard and acted upon. We have documented a great many cases where that simply is the case. People have met the blank face of the bureaucracy, which has not even been prepared to listen to their arguments, let alone give them some relief from a tax which, in fact, they should not be paying. The interim response from the Government - their knee-jerk administrative response - does not, and cannot, deal with the deficiencies in this legislation. The Government itself should have moved to remove the anomalies that exist.
Since its introduction in 1991, land tax on residential properties has caused problems and has placed many people under financial and personal stress. The intention of the amendments in 1991 - this Government's amendments - was to apply the tax to all property in the ACT and to provide for some exemptions. Specifically, those exemptions were to relate to rural land, Housing Trust land, and the principal place of residence of a person. The intention of the original exemptions clearly has been undone, in terms of residential land, by errors of application and by errors of interpretation of the law. These errors have been exacerbated by the Government's apparent philosophical position that all land holdings, other than those on which the owner actually resides and then only for the period of residence by the owner, are held for commercial gain. That is a misunderstanding of the situation.
The intention ought reasonably be to levy tax on those privately owned residential properties that are intended by the owners to be income earning. I do not think anybody would deny the right of the Government to impose tax on income earning property. We happen to have a philosophical difference with the Labor Party on that. We do not believe that the present law is appropriate, but I concede that it is open for the Labor Government to take that view. But surely it has to be an income earning property. Tax cannot, in fairness, Madam Speaker - - -
Mr Berry: Why did you put the price up before?
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