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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1526 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

Mr Whitecross's approach has no caps. As we know, our system will allow people to claim up to $50. So, we can assess just what the exposure for the Government is in this area. We can determine what level of rebate people may be likely to claim. In an uncapped system, there is simply no way of doing that. If we pass Mr Whitecross's amendments, there is no way of knowing exactly what the Government will be up for. That must make it bad legislation, Mr Speaker. There is a significantly broader group of people than the Government has in its legislation and an uncapped amount of money that each one of those people would be able to not claim back, but get up front. So, again, there is no way of being able to determine just how much revenue would be lost.

If the classes of beneficiaries are broadened considerably - and it could be by 10,000 to 15,000 people, which is again a significant number of people - you can imagine the significantly greater amount of administration that would be required there. The Revenue Office, we believe, could be required to process some 40,000 applications. That is a huge number of applications. I do not believe that that is an appropriate approach. As we all know, nobody likes levying taxes or bringing in new taxes. When we announced this in last year's budget - there has been a quite long time for members of the Assembly to get up to speed on this particular issue - we did not expect the new tax to be welcomed by the community. But, equally, what we have to do in the ACT is attempt to increase our revenue raising capacity wherever possible, to bring ourselves into line with New South Wales. Let us be fair; we are only over the border from them, and I think to have similar taxation approaches is very sensible. As we all know, we need more revenue in the ACT to provide for the services that the people of Canberra have a right to expect.

If we go down the path that Mr Whitecross wants us to go down, we will lose, I understand, something like $2m. Think about the things that $2m can provide. Two million dollars can provide an awful lot of surgery for people on our elective waiting lists. It can provide a lot of police. It can provide some very important services in education for disadvantaged people. I do not believe that it is a good way to spend money. I think that it would have been appropriate for Mr Whitecross to listen to the briefing that he got the other night and to understand the amount of work that has gone into this particular legislation to ensure that - No. 1 - we target the people who do have cheque accounts, older people who tend to use cheques more often. This is unlike the approach of any other State, apart from Tasmania, Mr Speaker. Nobody else even has concession approaches. In other States, pensioners and the long-term unemployed pay this tax.

The Government has gone a long way to attempt to accommodate people who could end up being adversely affected, to any extent, by this legislation. But Mr Whitecross's approach manages to totally undermine the revenue raising capacity of the legislation. That might be a nice thing to talk about out there in the community, to say, "Hey, I changed the tax base, and now you do not have to pay it". That is lovely. But, Mr Speaker, at the end of the day, we still need to pay for education, health, police and all of the other things that ACT-based taxes and charges are levied for.

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