Page 3197 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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household rates by $65 million to cover the shortfall, the black hole that the abolition of the land tax would create?
You must say what your alternative position is. You stand up in this place, bag this government and this tax and say you do not support it. But, if you do not support it, what are you going to do in its place? You either have to raise the money in some other way or you have to cut services to the tune of $65 million. What are you going to do? Are you going to raise the revenue in some other way? If so, how? Tell us. Let us know. Let the people of Canberra in on the secret—or tell us which $65 million worth of services you will not deliver in government. Tell us. Tell us now. Let the people of Canberra in on your secret. Let us have no more of these code motions: “Let us review this. We do not support land tax but we do not have a view, a single view, about what we would do in its stead. We are not suggesting an alternative tax. We will just leave a void.”
I do not know how you get away with it with the media when you say, “We are the party that will abolish the emergency services tax. We are the party that will abolish the water abstraction charge. We are the party that does not support land tax. We are the party that is on the record today as saying that the utilities facilities charge should not be supported because it is bad for business and bad for the town.” If you are not going to collect that $16 million through the utilities facilities charge, where are you going to get the money? Tell us. Stop this nonsense. Stop introducing motions that do not reflect an alternative position.
The government will not support this motion. The government is determined to ensure that, in delivering government services to the extent and the quality that the people of Canberra demand and deserve, we have the revenues to meet their expectations and to deliver those services. As I said yesterday in detail, we are considering the mix of issues, the levers that affect affordability. I do not deny for one minute that land tax is a significant issue, but I am not going to adjust it on the basis of an anecdotal view expressed that this is the evil. You just need to go to the numbers—
Mrs Dunne: No-one has actually said, “Adjust it on the basis of an anecdotal view.”
MR STANHOPE: You just need to go to the numbers for the interstate comparisons. Median house rents in Australia in the last year increased by 1.9 per cent in Sydney, seven per cent in Melbourne, 16 per cent in Brisbane, nine per cent in Adelaide, 19 per cent in Perth and only six per cent in Canberra. Was it land tax in those places? Obviously not. (Time expired.)
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.21): In the context of any discussions about increasing the affordability of housing in the ACT, it is not possible to avoid the topic of land tax, and I thank Mr Mulcahy for raising this issue today. I will be supporting the Liberal Party’s motion, though I will not be supporting the sort of meaning that Mr Stanhope gave to it today, which is not, I believe, what the motion says.
Before Mr Stanhope starts calling me names and accusing me of believing things that I am not even stating, I want to say that I am supporting in this motion the observations in paragraph (1). There is an acute shortage of rental accommodation in Canberra, especially at the lower end of the market, and Canberra tenants are paying a high level of rent for that accommodation. I note here, of course, that in my discussions with real
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