Page 3603 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 19 October 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
The Chief Commissioner may, on payment of the prescribed application fee, grant a permit to purchase diesel fuel for off-road purposes to any person who, in the opinion of the Chief Commissioner, uses diesel fuel for those purposes.
That is, off-road purposes. There is no reference here to a residential requirement. There is no indication here that you need to be a person living in New South Wales to be able to obtain that exemption. Indeed, we took the trouble today to ring both the office of the New South Wales Treasurer and the New South Wales State Revenue Office to clarify the situation. They confirmed that there is no residency requirement to obtain an exemption from a diesel fuel franchise fee. If I go to New South Wales and show that I am a primary producer, even a primary producer in the ACT, and that I need diesel fuel for off-road purposes, I am entitled to obtain a certificate of exemption.
Obviously, those opposite think the people of the ACT are pretty stupid. They apparently do not imagine that these people will have the nous to realise that they can walk across the border to New South Wales, produce the evidence that they have produced up to now to the ACT Government and show that they are off-road consumers of diesel fuel, and then say, "We would like a certificate in New South Wales and we will purchase our diesel fuel in New South Wales and we will be 7.08c a litre better off by doing so". Of course that is what they will do. I would suggest that it is conceivable that even some home heating consumers could do the same thing - put a 44-gallon drum on the back of their ute, go across to Queanbeyan, perhaps satisfy them there that they are using this for home heating purposes, and take it back over the border and not pay the 7.08c a litre.
I mentioned that there were some eight million litres of diesel fuel consumed by industry in the ACT. The fact of life is that people will go across the border if they possibly can. I have had the advantage of a briefing from people in the Chief Minister's Treasury, people who have provided information about the situation, and I will apprise the Assembly of what they have told us. They have indicated to me and a couple of other members of the Assembly that they believe that it will not be possible for people to go across the border and obtain certificates in New South Wales because fuel that is to be consumed in the ACT will not be eligible for the exemption which the Chief Minister is now proposing to remove.
It has not been explained to me or to the other members at that briefing how that tracing of fuel purchased in New South Wales is going to be engineered. If I fill up my backhoe on the back of a trailer in Queanbeyan, how does the retailer of diesel fuel know that I am going to use it in the ACT? If I am a company that does business in both the ACT and New South Wales, how on earth is he going to be able to tell whether I am going to use this particular purchase of diesel fuel in the ACT and not New South Wales? The Chief Minister seems to feel that it is illegal to purchase that product in New South Wales. It is not, according to the State Revenue Office of New South Wales. They say that it is perfectly possible for people to purchase that product in New South Wales - perfectly legally possible.
Mr Berry: Legal or possible?
MR HUMPHRIES: Both legal and possible, Mr Berry.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .