Page 2289 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 15 September 1992
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To be fair, the Government has had the sense to adopt instalment payments and pro rata payments from the Opposition's Bill. I am sure that this was not to make the Opposition happy; but perhaps it was to appease the two Independents who have strong views on this matter. I am sure that the Government will argue that they have made the concessions on instalment payments and pro rata payments in response to community demand; but it is significant, Madam Speaker, that the wording of the Government's Bill is virtually a verbatim replication of my Bill, and my Bill was on the table three weeks before theirs. If this is in response to community need, how come the wording is so much the same? It was clearly not the Government's intention to recognise community demands even a month ago. The Chief Minister said on 11 August:
The system we have in place is efficient and is being handled well. The changes that have recently been made -
through their own administrative arrangements -
to the land tax arrangement address, in my view, the vast majority of the problems that have been raised with me by constituents ...
In other words, she was perfectly happy with the situation as it was then. The changes referred to, of course, were those put in place by the Government through administrative change, not through legislative change.
Although on the same day the Chief Minister recognised some deficiencies in the Act, the Government's statements appear contradictory in other areas as well. The Chief Minister declared, for example, that instalment payments would not be considered because they were inefficient and costly. She said about pro rata payments:
I do not have it in mind to make the payment of land tax pro rata ...
Yet one month later we are debating a government Bill that proposes both instalment payments and pro rata payments. Is that not incredible? The Government clearly has had a recent change of heart on this issue, and only since I tabled my private members Bill on this issue. They were behind the eight ball and had to catch up in some fashion.
The central issue, Madam Speaker, on which resolution of all the other issues depends, is this: What is really being taxed? It is not, as the Government states, the potential for extracting rent from property. That is not the basis of the tax. That is, as I have already said, ideological nonsense, just as such a proposition would be in relation to any other form of taxation. The central issue, in fact, is the "clear intent in the extension of land tax to make commercial properties pay land tax" on "commercial properties whether they are residential in nature or of some other nature". I am quoting the Chief Minister again.
I agree that the use to which the property is put should be the central proposition in determining tax liability. They are not my words; they are the Chief Minister's words. Unfortunately, the Chief Minister has not ensured that the stated intention of the tax is translated into law - neither in the original Bill, nor in her amendments to it. The Government's Act failed to do that; the Government's Bill fails to rectify it.
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