Page 171 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Corbell talked about the capacity to limit the one-off costs of things. It would be fine if the people who own all of the restaurants around town said, “Our back alleys are a bit grotty and there is graffiti there. Why don’t we all chip money into a sinking fund like you would if you had a body corporate and pay someone to go around once a month and paint things?” But for the dentist in Hobart Place or for the accountant in Turner to have to pay to remove the graffiti from the back alleys of Garema Place, which is what is being proposed here, is completely and utterly unjust. That is why the Liberal Party is opposing this piece of legislation. That is one of the reasons.
The other reason is the thing touched on by Dr Foskey. We do not have any real understanding of where this money will be going. It is a case of saying, “Trust us; we are from the government. Somewhere down the line we will come in with a disallowable instrument which will show us how much the levy will be, where it will be levied, at what rate it will be levied, whether it will be differentiated, and a range of other things about what sorts of projects might be covered by it.” Everyone here has a list of projects and we always want to talk about graffiti, but, as Mr Mulcahy said, why should the dentists in Hobart Place or the accountant in Turner make a contribution for the repainting of the Melbourne Building because some of us do not like the job that was done?
Mr Corbell, as the Minister for Planning, has sufficient powers to impose penalties on people who do not maintain their leases appropriately. If Mr Corbell is concerned about the paint job on the Melbourne Building, he should exercise his powers as the Minister for Planning and have the lessee fix it up. If Mr Corbell and other people want to do something about graffiti on private walls, they can do that. They could send people from the Department of Territory and Municipal Services today to paint walls and they could levy the leaseholders to bring back the cost. There are mechanisms that they have.
This mechanism is unnecessary, it is cumbersome, and it fails the first test of an efficient tax. I suspect that Mr Barr, who is not here and who likes to lecture people about the importance of being an economic rationalist, will tell those other cabinet colleagues how this fails the test of an efficient tax. This is a $1.2 million tax in a full year, Mr Speaker, and the mechanism described in the briefings and in this place today is cumbersome and unwarranted for such a small amount of money. By the time that we have the officials in the office of revenue collecting the money, we put together a company limited by guarantee and we have a board to oversee it some of the money will slough off.
I will lay bets now that the $1.2 million will never be returned to the city heart. Some of the $1.2 million every year, a large proportion of it, will be subsumed by the administration of the trust, by the administration of the whole grants process. If it is not, it will mean that ACT taxpayers are again subsidising. If these costs are absorbed by the Treasury and the revenue office, they will not be fully reflected in what is happening. This is bad policy. It is inefficient policy. It is inefficient taxation and it will not meet the needs that it will set out to do.
As all of us have said before, if this were a voluntary scheme, if all the people who are saying that they would love to pay a levy actually paid the levy themselves, put their
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .