Page 3256 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 19 August 2008
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forward in this bill would allow rules for calculation of duty to be changed merely by a change in the instrument referred to in a ministerial declaration.
As I have said, this seemingly innocuous change has fairly wide ramifications for government accountability to this legislature. This is because, unlike changes in ministerial declarations, changes in the accompanying instrument, I am advised, do not have the same mechanism for scrutiny by the Assembly. Whereas a determination under section 139 of part 1 of the Taxation Administration Act is a disallowable instrument, an accompanying policy is not, and it may easily be changed without the Assembly ever being aware of the change. This has clear ramifications for accountability to the legislature. It is a core principle of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy that the executive arm of government must be accountable to the parliament through proper mechanisms for notification and review of decisions.
In this case, I fear we are setting up a mechanism where the rules for the duty on motor vehicles in the ACT are essentially being delegated, to a large extent, to policy makers who are unaccountable to the legislature. We are also setting up a system in which changes can be made without any legislative assurance of notification to the Assembly. No doubt, some would argue that so long as the Assembly is able to disallow the ministerial declaration, it does not really matter whether it can disallow the instruments to which it refers. However, I do not think this is good enough, since those instruments can be changed without any notification to the legislature. I think at some point we have to ask ourselves whether legislation has delegated too much power to the executive government at the expense of parliamentary oversight.
Although not forming part of the bill itself, I will speak for a moment on the green vehicle stamp duty scheme, which is the policy instrument contemplated by this bill. If this bill is passed then it appears that this policy will be adopted as part of a ministerial declaration on rates of duty. This will mean that this policy will become part of the law affecting duty determinations and that any changes in this policy by bureaucrats in the ACT government will become de facto changes in ACT law—all, I might again add, without any notification to the legislature.
I will begin by saying that there is certainly some merit in schemes to allow duty concessions to vehicles with good environmental performance. When the government wishes to attain some environmental objective, a tax concession aimed at incentivising this objective can be a good way of accomplishing this goal. But I am always sceptical of government subsidies, and so I stress that a tax concession is not a subsidy. It involves essentially taking less of a person’s money rather than giving them money taken from others. I therefore have no objection in principle to schemes of tax concessions for this or that government objective.
I am on record as being an opponent of the high levels of taxation imposed by this government, and so I certainly welcome proposals for concessions and reductions in those taxes, even if those concessions are contingent on specific circumstances, actions or, in this case, purchases. I am generally in favour of tax concessions designed to encourage environmentally friendly products and practices, and a duty concession for environmentally friendly vehicles seems to me to be prima facie a worthwhile suggestion. However, the devil is in the detail of the accompanying
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