Page 3544 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 20 November 2007
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The act currently permits a refund of duty paid if the lease is terminated early. The refund is only available in cases where a new lease is not taken up by the same or an associated person. The bill narrows the condition for refund so that it is not available in cases where the new lease is for substantially the same property as the terminated lease. This measure is a deterrent against terminating one lease and structuring a second slightly different lease just to contrive a refund of duty.
I would like to remind the members of the Assembly that these measures are in accord with the IGA which allows the introduction of anti-avoidance measures to protect the remaining revenue base after the abolition of a tax.
I thank members for their support of the bill. But I do find it quite remarkable that the shadow Treasurer presents a policy position of immediate abolition and of not seeking to prevent the avoidance of taxation—a very, very sloppy and lackadaisical approach to the territory’s finances, if I may say so. You have a remarkable position being presented by the shadow Treasurer, on behalf of the Liberal Party, in relation to the IGA when he stands today and says that, had the Liberal Party been in government now, accepting the arrangements that were made as a precursor to state and territory agreements—the IGA in relation to GST—he would willingly forgo the revenue that the taxes to be abolished present.
Why would you do that, for goodness sake? Why would any government do that? No government in Australia ever have, but an ACT Liberal government would have, in the view of Mr Mulcahy, willingly forgone revenue that they were not required to forgo as part of the package of measures agreed in relation to the introduction of a GST in Australia. Mr Mulcahy presents what he says as a formal Liberal Party position.
Having signed up to the GST, the ACT, along with all the states and the Northern Territory, agreed to a process of removal of a range of existing taxes, including this. It was agreed that a timetable would be agreed, and the timetable has explicitly been accepted by Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer, on behalf of the commonwealth, as consistent with the IGA. But the Liberal Party present this remarkable position today that they would have moved to abolish all of these taxes immediately. There would not have been a need for any avoidance measures because the Liberal Party would have abolished them immediately. We would have gone for the last five years without the revenues—and it is tens of millions of dollars of revenue we are talking about.
Mr Mulcahy: You twist things.
MR STANHOPE: I am not twisting a thing. The shadow Treasurer is now embarrassed at the obvious or logical conclusion of the comment that he made—that he cannot understand why the territory and the states did not agree to abolish these taxes immediately; why there was a need to delay; why we did not, in the words of the shadow Treasurer, “move immediately” to forgo this revenue; and then having agreed, in his words or in his sense, to reluctantly proceed to abolish these range of taxes, why we did not then go the further step of putting in place measures that would have prevented the tax being avoided. Mr Mulcahy then pretends to seriously suggest that
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