Page 2298 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 15 September 1992
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You only need, Madam Speaker, to look at the explanatory memorandum to the Government's Bill to realise that this is not a Bill designed to alleviate the burden of land tax or to make land tax fairer, because in the section indicating the financial implications it says:
Additional revenue from expansion of the land tax base to include investment flats is expected to be $0.2 million in 1993-94 and each year thereafter.
Your so-called reforms to the land tax will actually increase the burden of land tax in this community, but you have painted it as some kind of response to community concern about the unfair way that land tax applies. You have created the impression that this land tax Bill of yours will ease land tax in the ACT.
Mr De Domenico: They have tried to create the impression.
MR HUMPHRIES: They have tried, indeed. Mr De Domenico makes the right point; they have tried to make that impression and they will not succeed. There is genuine and deep-felt community concern about the way this land tax is being imposed. Your Bill will not fool anybody. All those people out there who have written to us and to you, and to the Canberra Times and elsewhere, about the problems of land tax will not be mollified one iota by the tokenistic steps you are taking here tonight. I think that this issue will come back in more and more forms to haunt this Government as the people of the ACT realise that they have been taken for a ride yet again.
Mr Kaine: So have the Independents.
MR HUMPHRIES: And, of course, the Independents in this place who, unfortunately, seem to think that the Government's Bill in some way does something about the problem of land tax. It does not. It actually makes the burden of land tax on the community heavier. I do not think, to be quite frank, that the Government has really understood from day one how land tax has really impacted on this Territory.
You can see from the comments that have been made here tonight, particularly on the other side of the chamber in interjections, what kind of mentality underpins the Government's approach towards this land tax question. The comment by Mr Lamont - "The rich; it is all about the rich; we are targeting the rich in this matter" - is a contemptible statement. It is untrue. Mr Lamont, if he had any decency, would acknowledge that he is conserving a grave injustice on those people in this Territory who worked hard to secure some investment for their own future. Of course, we had the comment by Mrs Grassby. Again it was a contemptible comment about people in the ACT who put money aside to make that saving and to secure that investment in their own future. I quote, "Talk about the greed; it is unbelievable, the greed that people want. They are never satisfied. It is complete greed; that is what it is". Those comments, Madam Speaker, deserve to go much further than this chamber, and I assure you that they will.
The confusion in the Government's ranks came home to me by a question that I asked the Chief Minister on 11 August this year. I asked her about the decision that she had made in her haphazard response to the problem of land tax and her chopping and changing about what should be done about it. I asked her a question about family companies which own a family home and whether she
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