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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 10 Hansard (23 September) . . Page.. 3561 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

a bit cute about this proposed tax. He has noted that the policy would operate on a similar basis to that in Victoria, but he has not told us that Victoria has enacted legislation to abolish this form of tax as from 1 July 2004. Western Australia has announced that it will remove this tax from unsecured loans.

Also, the Treasurer has not told us that under the intergovernmental agreement there will be a review by a ministerial council of the need to retain certain stamp duties, including mortgage duty, by 2005. That might well help in terms of the housing affordability crisis. Are we keeping up with most of the rest of Australia or are we one step behind and out of time?

Of more immediate concern to us was the outcome from the estimates hearing that there could be some adverse unintended consequences arising from the loan security duty as presented by the Treasurer. We were told during the hearings that this proposed tax could lead to unintended double taxation of transactions, but that further research was necessary to establish more details about these outcomes. As far as we are concerned, that is not good enough.

To emphasise the lack of precision that is evident in this policy, we were told during the hearings that the duty would not apply to family trusts. Subsequently, the Treasurer wrote to Mr Smyth advising the duty would apply to family trusts. As we are now aware, the Treasurer has deferred the implementation of the loan security duty to permit full consultation to take place. I would have thought that full consultation should have taken place before any implementation date.

I am concerned also that the consideration of the proposed loan security duty is another policy process whereby this government, this Treasurer, treats the community with disdain. In practical terms, this confusion has meant that the Assembly had before it the Revenue Legislation Amendment Bill 2003, containing the loan security tax, and subsequently that bill was replaced by the Revenue Legislation Amendment Bill 2003 (No 2), from which the loan security tax had been removed. What a great waste of drafting resources! In a manual about how to approach the development and implementation of public policy, these examples would be included in the sections on how not to do so.

Mr Deputy Speaker, there are further examples to illustrate the sloppiness and perhaps the laziness of the approach that has been adopted by the government and the Treasurer to matters of public policy. We in the opposition will continue to monitor these and all subsequent examples of sloppiness that come to light through the actions of this government in the management of the portfolio and we will ensure that, come the next election campaign, the ACT community will be well briefed on the failings of this government as an economic manager.

There are some real concerns. The revenue that this government is getting at present from land sales, stamp duty, et cetera, is not going to last forever. The huge increase in expenditure that we can see in this budget over the last budget may well not be sustainable when the income that the government receives dries up or is less than it has become used to. That is something that scares me. I do not particularly want to be in a situation some time down the track of going into government and having to do what we did from 1995 through to about 2000 to pull the territory out of the economic quagmire it

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