Page 4039 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 16 December 1992
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We cannot get to the point of saying, "It is all right to retrospectively tax certain individuals, certain corporations or certain bodies and it is not all right to tax others". That is a silly proposition. It is a ridiculous proposition. I do not care whether it is the health funds, individuals, someone in the remand centre or whoever it might be who gets taxed retrospectively. It is wrong, it should not take place and we should oppose it wherever it occurs. I hope that the administration will get the message very quickly and that they will not try to pull on these kinds of things again if these sorts of measures are considered as a device in future.
The fact of life is that this particular provision arises out of comments made, I understand, by the Scrutiny of Bills Committee back in April this year. We are now at the stage where, at the death knell of the Assembly in December, amendments are put up to retrospectively make up for the taxation that the Government could have been collecting since April. If I had seen a Bill come down quickly in May, I might just have been tempted to deal with the matter.
Mr Connolly: You would have said, "Too fast".
MR HUMPHRIES: No. The point of the matter is that you have known since April that this has been a problem and you thought to yourselves, "That is all right. We will just carry on as we have been doing. We will continue to collect the money and we will backdate the law so that they have to fork out the money, notwithstanding the fact that we have not done anything about it for more than six months". That is not good enough. It is not the way we should work. The way we should work is to make it clear that we are going to tell the people, whether they are individuals or corporations, in advance what their tax obligations are so that they know, on the basis of their prospective obligations, what they should do about their particular financial situation. For that reason, Madam Speaker, we oppose clause 6.
MR MOORE (6.14): I think it would be of interest in debating this clause if the Chief Minister were prepared to indicate to members the sum of money involved in this retrospectivity. That would certainly be an addition to the debate. Madam Speaker, I recall the reaction when Malcolm Fraser retrospectively legislated against the bottom-of-the-harbour scheme. Much as I disagreed with the bottom-of-the-harbour scheme and those sorts of tax evasion methods, I think the principle of changing the law retrospectively to make illegal what was legal under the taxation system was inappropriate.
Legislating retrospectively to catch people in that way was inappropriate because the fault was clearly the Government's inadequacy. That is what Mr Fraser was not prepared to wear. It seems to me that the inadequacy here - certainly from April onwards - is with the Government rather than with the health funds that were collecting the levy. It is inappropriate for us to legislate retrospectively in this case.
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