Page 162 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
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and with good cause. Why should people in professional offices who have no interest in the bread and circuses that seem to be so regularly advocated by this government be paying for these things? They will not enhance their business. Many of those businesses are based not on location, but on all sorts of other considerations. The staging of events in the middle of Civic is not going to do any commercial good for them; it will simply result in an extra tax burden.
I do not think this has been thought through. This will go the way of the parking levy and other things. Down the track we are going to find that it will go. It will all get too hard; it will be put on the shelf after it has been brought in for a while. It is not an equitable measure. It raises real concerns in terms of precedent for other shopping districts around Canberra.
I am concerned to see that, when you look at the Chief Minister’s comments as to the rationale, much of this emanates from a concept of cost transference. His plan is to say, basically, that this will make the city cleaner and safer. It is not the role of private citizens to start dealing with public safety issues. That is the task of the territory government; that is the task of the police forces, the responsibility of the police minister. It is not for private citizens to take these matters on themselves. They pay taxes for the government to do this job. For that reason, the opposition will oppose this bill.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (10.58): The Greens are supportive of this project. The notion of a small extra levy on rates to be returned to a levy payers association to spend on projects in and around Civic to assist in developing a stronger sense of community among its business and retail operations is a good one. It is not a new idea for Canberra. It has been talked about by the retailers and property owners since at least the mid to late 1990s in forums such as the Civic precinct management group, set up under then Chief Minister Kate Carnell. Later, when City Heart Canberra was established, its members continued to explore the idea. I am aware that many of Civic’s commercial property owners—the city’s largest retail centre, the Canberra Centre, and many of the smaller businesses—have expressed support for this proposal. I am also aware that some have not.
This amendment to the rates legislation is fairly simple. The levy can be imposed only on rates applying to commercial and retail properties, not on residential or community use properties. I note that the minister may determine the areas where levies are to be collected and that there is nothing to prevent him from terminating the levy altogether if it becomes evident that the project is not working. The scheme, once implemented, will give levy payers both an incentive and a vehicle for collaboration and a base for effective and purposeful lobbying over issues such as parking, capital works and the provision of services and amenities. Of course, not all businesses are retail and not all retail businesses are ratepayers. However, the levy as proposed could add about $300 to an annual $60,000 rent bill if it were passed on. This is about a tenth of a typical advertising levy, which is, in effect, already a part of the rental costs for many of those businesses.
The benefits the community development function of the levy would deliver to ratepaying businesses in the city, including the opportunity to influence the uses to which the levy would be put, ought to well and truly outweigh the cost, although there
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