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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (9 May) . . Page.. 1234 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

Apparently, he began to finance his wars in France and Scotland by instituting both income and personal property taxes. Not surprisingly, this so strained his relationship with the English nobility that the parliament set about curtailing the royal authority. It concluded and set in stone the principle that no tax should be levied without consent of the realm as a whole as represented by the parliament.

Mr Speaker, this government bill does not contain an intentional evil that the Liberal Party wishes to impose on our community but, more importantly, it opens the door just a tiny crack for such a thing to take place in the future. If it has been good enough for the last 703 years for Westminster parliaments around the world to live with the principle that only parliament can raise a tax, then perhaps we can all put up with it for a little while longer.

I appreciate Mr Humphries' denials that he would never consider allowing this door to be opened any wider, but we need to remember that one day there will be other people sitting in those seats opposite making decisions for the territory. Good intentions now can easily become lost in a few short years and misinterpreted by some future cash-strapped government.

Thin-end-of-the-wedge solutions such as this, Mr Speaker, can easily take on a life of their own and become such a part of us that we can never get rid of them. Members might wish to consider the history of pay-as-you-earn income tax as a lesson-an idea introduced by Pitt the Younger in 1799 as a temporary measure to raise funds for the Napoleonic wars.

As I have said, Mr Speaker, rather than rejecting this bill outright, I suggest that the government have a look at the report and what I have had to say. I am quite happy to have discussions with them before the legislation comes on, to see whether I personally would support it. But it is very clear that there is a fundamental principle here. Given what this government has been through in the last couple of years, I would have thought that they would have given more thought to trying to overturn it.

I commend the report to the Assembly.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (10.44): Mr Speaker, I hear what Mr Osborne had to say about this legislation. I have also put on the record previously the government's views about this, and I want to do so again very clearly. The principle that Mr Osborne has stated, that parliaments should either enact taxation laws or authorise taxation laws, is a principle to which this government adheres absolutely. I can say with some confidence that in my time in this place I have stood very firmly behind that principle. There have been debates of this kind in the past, and my view has never wavered from the view that parliament must impose or authorise the imposition of such taxes. It should not and cannot be done by the executive.

There are examples, however, of where parliament has authorised the levying of taxes by the executive where the detail or the form of the tax has not been finally determined by parliament but rather has been determined by the executive with the authority of parliament. A good example of that, I think we will find, was only a few months ago in this place, with the passage of the Road Transport (General) Bill 1999. It was part of

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