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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 158 ..

MRS CARNELL: No; it cannot achieve anything. What can it achieve? The total amount of rates, the total bill, will stay the same. I think it is really important to spell this out again. The amount of money the ACT Government gets in rates will be identical. It will be last year's amount plus the CPI, so it does not affect our revenue base at all. It may change the ups and downs of a few people very marginally; but, for every person who pays a bit less, another person pays a bit more. I know you guys just have to be really embarrassed about this.

As well as no change to the revenue base, as well as no real change to the way rates will be apportioned across Canberra, it also means that people will not know what rates they are going to pay until very close to the end of the financial year, because it is going to take us three months to do it. As things stand, as soon as we pass the Bill, they will know what their rates are likely to be for next financial year, but that will not be the case now. There will be information that I believe people want in order to budget for next year that simply will not be available. Add to that a bill for $400,000, which is money we will not be able to spend elsewhere on other services that are desperately needed at the moment.

For the life of me, I cannot see why this Assembly would require a 1997 valuation to be done. To include 1997 valuations, from a Government perspective, will make limited difference - I have made that clear already - except that we will have to pay a bill for $400,000 that we would not have had to pay otherwise. But it is not our money; it is the taxpayers' money. At the end of the day, it is the people of Canberra who pay their rates who will pay the $400,000 that Mr Whitecross seems to believe is terribly important.

The reality is that the legislation that is currently in place does require annual valuations, although not on 1 January, as Mr Whitecross indicated. At one stage he said that we had broken the law by not doing it then. Mr Whitecross knows perfectly well that that is not the case. (Extension of time granted) Mr Whitecross would be very well aware that it says "as soon as practicable after the beginning of the financial year".

Mr Whitecross: You had no intention of doing that.

MRS CARNELL: I have to say, Mr Whitecross, that we made it quite clear that we had no intention of doing it when we put forward that proposal.

Mr Whitecross: No, you did not. It is a proposal.

MRS CARNELL: When we put forward the exposure draft, we made it very clear that 1997 valuations were not involved in it.

Mr Whitecross: Where in your speech did you say that?

MRS CARNELL: It is in all of the documents I tabled in the Assembly, where we made it very clear. If the Assembly had knocked back our exposure draft and said, "No; this is not good enough either", we were then in a position to go straight into a 1997 valuation, if that was what the Assembly wanted. Our view was that, if the Assembly liked our exposure draft, as they have all claimed they do, or as they seem to, then the need for a 1997 valuation becomes non-existent. It simply does not affect the model as put on the table in this place.

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