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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1518 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

On Monday night, there was a lengthy discussion in the Chief Minister's office about the Opposition's amendments. The Government put forward some compelling arguments about tax avoidance and additional administrative costs, particularly with the exemption scheme. The Government's counteramendments are to keep the rebate system but to extend the rebate to long-term unemployed people. The Greens are happy to keep the rebate system, because we agree that the administrative costs and the possibility of tax avoidance are quite significant. We do, however, believe that all health care card holders should have access to the rebate, and we have prepared our own amendments which we will move before the Government's amendments are moved.

It is not appropriate to decide to focus on just one group of disadvantaged people in the community, for whatever reason. If it is not efficient to be targeting all of them, then you wonder why this initiative was started at all. It does not make sense to say, "Because this is difficult to administer and it is inefficient, we will target only this one particular group". That is very unfair, and I cannot see how the community would have confidence in that sort of decision. We are stepping onto dangerous ground when we start singling out groups, when the Commonwealth has come up with a comprehensive definition of disadvantage.

By far the most significant cost, as far as the proposals Labor has put up are concerned, is in relation to the exemption scheme. The administrative costs associated with extending the rebate scheme to all disadvantaged persons are only $100,000, and the added revenue forgone - if all the people who are estimated to apply for a rebate do - will be $0.5m, although Mrs Carnell has just told me that those figures are not correct and that there is actually another $280,000 on top of that, which would bring it up to $880,000.

There is one further thing I would like to add. The Government should think very seriously about how it can advertise this rebate to people - if this is successful - so that it assists the people who need it and want it. I do not know whether there is a possibility of banks including some information when they post out account statements. Newsletters of community groups should also, obviously, be targeted. I think we will have to keep close tabs on this to make sure that the people who are supposed to benefit actually do. I will propose my amendments later in the debate.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (4.17), in reply: Mr Speaker, this is obviously going to end up being a quite long debate. I am disappointed that that is the case. We announced in last year's budget that we were going ahead with a debits tax Bill. We have now extended the concessions from just pensioners through to the long-term unemployed as well. That comes at an extra cost. I think that is more than reasonable, taking into account that no State other than Tasmania has a rebate scheme at all - which means that the people who end up with concessions in our Bill would not do so if they happened to live over the border.

Mr Speaker, to answer Ms Tucker's question, the reason that we chose that one particular group was that that one particular group of pensioners - particularly older pensioners - tend to be the group in our community that still use cheques. What has actually happened, as we all know, is that the use of cheques by individuals has decreased significantly. Certainly, businesses still use cheques; but that is not the issue. It was put

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