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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1553 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: If Ms Tucker believes that the government has not made out a particular case, it might have helped if she had come to the government to discuss the case the government was making for the removal of these subsidies. Ms Tucker says that there are problems with this legislation, that she does not understand what the government is trying to do and that the government has not made its case clearly enough With great respect, the government has put the legislation on the table. It presented an explanatory memorandum with the bill. It presented the speech that goes with the presentation of the bill. It presented the bill itself. If Ms Tucker has uncertainty about what the government is trying to do in the area where there is a very significant amount of change in the structure of taxation going on in the ACT, with great respect, she should have come and spoken to someone in the government and asked for some information about that matter.

Ms Tucker: You should have provided the information.

MR HUMPHRIES: We did. The second point I address to Mr Quinlan. I ask him to lend me his ears for one moment. There is a very important problem with removing the subsidy on low-alcohol wines, beers and spirits. The course of action the ACT government is taking in this bill is more or less the same approach as is being taken by the New South Wales government in equivalent legislation. I do not think I have to remind members what will happen if the ACT retains a subsidy scheme for low-alcohol beer and other products in the ACT and New South Wales does not. We know what is going to happen, don't we? There is going to be a trade in low-alcohol beer across the border, and the ACT will be subsidising consumers of those products in New South Wales.

I would predict that if there was a subsidy continuing in the ACT we would see a very large increase in the amount of low-alcohol products sold in the ACT, not necessarily to ACT consumers but to New South Wales consumers.

Ms Tucker: We might save lives in New South Wales.

MR HUMPHRIES: Ms Tucker is happy for us to be selling low-alcohol products throughout New South Wales with the ACT taxpayer subsidising drinkers in New South Wales. Ms Tucker, are you serious? It will not be just people living in Queanbeyan, Yass and places close to the ACT. Those subsidies can be quite substantial. The result of providing them in the ACT could well be that people set up firms in the ACT purporting to be engaged in retail in the ACT and in fact take the subsidies in the ACT and on-sell them to retailers across the whole of New South Wales. That is quite conceivable. If the subsidy is large enough, it will compensate for the freight costs that people would have to incur to get the alcohol delivered to the ACT and then sent back into New South Wales.

Ms Tucker is shaking her head. That is the advice I have had from the department, Ms Tucker. I suggest you go and avail yourself of the briefing which you have available to you, if you bother to take it up, and find out what the consequences are of having available in the ACT a subsidy which is not available in New South Wales. If Ms Tucker does not understand that, I suggest she find out some information about it before she takes those views up on the floor of the Assembly.

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