Page 3753 - Week 12 - Thursday, 21 October 1993
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Let us assume that another business that operates some mobile service, such as a backhoe hire service, has trucks in New South Wales. This is going to be a New South Wales business. Are you saying to me, Chief Minister, that a New South Wales business is going to be denied a permit by the New South Wales State revenue commissioner on the basis that he does some of his work in the ACT? Of course not. This is going to create a legal minefield. How is the New South Wales commissioner going to stop a New South Wales resident, a company operating in New South Wales, from doing business in the ACT and using fuel in the ACT? Of course, he cannot. Those questions, Madam Speaker, are quite obvious. They are quite obvious to all except this Government.
It is fine for the Chief Minister to say, "Yes, we are going to crack down on illegal uses of these fuels". But, of course, many of the uses to which people are going to put the fuel are not going to be illegal. They are going to be perfectly legal under the legislation operating both in New South Wales and in the ACT. The result will be the flight of business and the flight of government revenue across the border to New South Wales. That is the inevitable consequence of this piece of legislation. The legislation, apart from anything else, is inequitable. It puts on forms of home heating taxes which do not exist in other ways. It is contrary to the principles of social justice and it certainly results in a serious inconsistency between the taxation regimes of New South Wales and the ACT. For all of those reasons - for any one of those reasons - we ought to reject this seriously flawed piece of legislation.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (4.15), in reply: Madam Speaker, can I, firstly, clear up the question of the so-called meeting this morning that Mr Humphries referred to? What actually occurred was that in the lift this morning Mr Humphries said to me, "I believe that there is a meeting in your office about the franchise fee", to which I replied, "That is news to me", which it was. It subsequently transpired that a briefing - a further briefing for Mr Moore and Ms Szuty - on this Bill was to take place on the fifth floor at the time Mr Humphries mentioned. I want to make it clear that, had Mr Humphries asked for a briefing, he would most certainly have been given that sort of briefing, but I do not think there was justification for Mr Humphries - given his views on this Bill, just repeated now - to be in the same briefing as Mr Moore and Ms Szuty. I thank both of those members for the time that they have put into this Bill. I know that they have been briefed at great length, and I trust that all of their questions have now been answered. I also thank the Revenue Office staff members and my own staff who also assisted in that briefing process.
Madam Speaker, this Business Franchise (Tobacco and Petroleum Products) (Amendment) Bill provides for changes to the diesel fuel exemption scheme, and it is an integral component of the concessions reforms that were announced in the 1993-94 budget speech. I want to say at the start that I take Ms Szuty's point that that matter was not adequately traversed in the introductory speech for this Bill. Having crossed that ground in the budget speech, I had, of course, assumed that everybody else would be as aware as I was that this was a consequence of that budget initiative; but it should have been made clearer in the speech, and I apologise to members that it was not. On that subject, Madam Speaker, I say again that at a time when there is growth in numbers of pensioners and other beneficiaries, including the unemployed, that results in increased demand for concessions and other government welfare programs I believe that it is essential that social justice measures should be targeted to those who are in greatest need in our community.
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