Page 3109 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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In terms of the some of the business taxes, it is interesting to see that Mr Quinlan’s statement of early 2005—it is 2½ years since then—seems to be coming true. The government seems to be doing everything it possibly can to squeeze business until it bleeds. If you do that too much, then, when you have a bit of a downturn in the economy, which is inevitable, you will find that a lot of those businesses will be squeezed so much that they will not only bleed but bleed to death. That will have a significant impact on revenue coming into government.
You are setting yourselves and the territory up for a bit of failure. When that affects jobs, which currently are at a premium because we are in full employment, you will have people becoming unemployed. The people who become unemployed are often young people, because young people often get their start by working in the hospitality industry here.
All in all, these huge increases over the last few years are unfair. They are anti-business. They may not be having a huge impact yet, but rest assured that, sure as anything, they will. Mr Smyth’s motion is a timely one. You cannot see past your own blinkered stupidity in terms of accepting it, and that is unfortunate. It is a good motion. It is business friendly. It does not call on you to abolish the tax totally. I do not think that even the businesses themselves would necessarily accept that, because, at the end of the day, there is a certain benefit to the business as well as to the community in utilising an outdoor area.
But the tax has to be reasonable; it has to be fair. It should not go up by 139 per cent. It is not, as you say, 100 per cent. You lot still cannot add up; that is painfully obvious and you have made that point again today. The tax has gone up by 139 per cent, but even if it went up by 100 per cent, to take it to $42.80 over three years, that would still be completely unreasonable, especially for a business in an industry where, unlike Brisbane, Sydney, Darwin and Perth, you can comfortably sit outside for only about six months of the year. It is a real shame, but it is quite typical of this government, which clearly has its priorities wrong in many areas, including this one. It seems to take a delight in having a go at business, especially small business, by having such unreasonable increases in a tax on businesses that provide such a great amenity and a great service to the people of the ACT.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (11.21), in reply: I thank members, including Dr Foskey, for their support today. What the government is doing is illogical. Mr Hargreaves’s response is just classic John Hargreaves: “I have been caught; I am embarrassed; I will not rely on the facts or make a case; I will just get aggressive.” He sounds off at all and sundry and he makes preposterous statements like talking about the popularity of the scheme and saying that everybody joined. People did not have a choice; they had to join. They had to have this licence; otherwise you would have shut them down. In terms of the stupidity that we have heard today from the minister, that has to be the corker: “This scheme is very popular, because everybody joined.” They did not have a choice to opt out.
What do we know about Mr Hargreaves and his approach to this? Firstly, there is no substantiation of the need, there is no justification and there is no explanation of how this figure was determined. We know why; it is because Mr Hargreaves simply cannot
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