Page 3572 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 19 October 1993
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STAMP DUTIES AND TAXES (AMENDMENT) BILL (NO. 2) 1993
Debate resumed from 15 September 1993, on motion by Ms Follett:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR KAINE (3.15): Madam Speaker, this amendment Bill seeks to achieve three objectives in connection with the original Act. The first of those is to prevent avoidance of stamp duty where there has been a practice of rescinding a sales agreement that has been entered into, which is then set aside in favour of a later agreement with a third party. Of course, the net effect of that is that the stamp duty that would otherwise have been payable on the first transaction is forgone by the Government. The Opposition does not agree with that kind of tax avoidance action and therefore supports that part of this Bill.
A second thing that the Bill seeks to do is to prevent the avoidance of such duty on transactions involving a transfer of an interest in a Crown lease. That can be either an assignment of the lease in some fashion or a sublease. Again the Liberals in opposition do not agree with that kind of action to evade or avoid the payment of duty which is legitimately payable. We have no difficulty at all with those parts of the Bill.
The third objective of this Bill, however, is one that the Liberal Party does have difficulty with. That is the one which is described by the Chief Minister in her tabling speech as the imposition of a $20 minimum duty for processing documentation where stamp duty may or may not in the end be payable. We have two bases for taking exception to this proposal. First of all, what the Government is proposing to do is not to impose a $20 minimum duty because at the end of the day, as the Chief Minister herself acknowledged in her tabling speech, with a lot of these documents, when the assessment is done by the Revenue Office it is demonstrated that no duty is payable. A $20 charge cannot be in the nature of a duty. It is, in fact, a document handling charge. But that is not the way the Bill describes it; it describes it as a $20 minimum duty. We have difficulty with that.
Perhaps the Chief Minister, in replying to the in-principle stage of the debate, might inform us on some aspects of that. For example, what kinds of transactions attract stamp duty at the moment? What kinds of transactions are exempted? The tabling speech does not identify those. It talks about some 1,100 transactions last year which were exempted from duty, but there is no information as to what kinds of transactions they were. Were they transactions in connection with land? Were they transactions in connection with the transfer of moneys? Were they transactions in connection with gifts from one person to another? Just what were they? Once we know the nature of these transactions, we might then be able to accept a $20 document handling charge to process the documentation. It might be acceptable, if we know the kinds of transactions to which it relates. But we have no information on that. Perhaps the Chief Minister can tell us just which transactions and what kinds of transactions they are.
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