Page 1588 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 31 March 2009
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Agent Phillip Kouvelis said Mr Quinlan did not seem briefed on the purpose of a breakfast meeting with real estate agents on Thursday morning. The topic was about the increasing impact that taxes had on ACT real estate. When Mr Kouvelis raised land tax a second time at the meeting, Mr Quinlan called for a common sense approach and added the squeeze-till-you-bleed comment.
Yesterday Mr Quinlan said he had been joking.
He should have read his briefing notes more closely because he was unaware the meeting was confined to land tax.
“If anyone was traumatised by the remark, they have my apology. I didn’t get the impression that anyone took particular offence at all.”
He said land tax had increased significantly because values had increased significantly, with the ACT tax higher than Queensland’s and Victoria’s but better than NSW’s tax regime.
Opposition … said the joke was callous. Property Owners and Ratepayers Association president Peter Jensen said Mr Quinlan should resign and leave the Assembly.
ACT Real Estate Institute president Stan Platis said if the remark was a throwaway line, it showed the Government was not listening to the ACT’s peak real estate body. In the ACT, land tax could represent an annual impost on landlords of 40 percent of annual net rentals return.
Property Council of Australia president Greg Lyons said he was surprised by the remark. The council had a strong view that stamp duty on commercial conveyancing should be removed to fulfil the state government’s promise on the eve of the GST’s introduction. Land tax needed reforming as well.
Mr Kouvelis said, “If that is the attitude of the Government, it will definitely be a turn-off. People do ask what the costs are in owning a property in Canberra.
“The land tax component is three times higher than any other payment and it is factored in. The rent has to be attractive enough to make it all worthwhile.”
We may well ask whether anything has changed since 2005. I think the answer is no; we are still in that same situation.
In more recent times this attitude has been repeated. Sadly, the approach of the Stanhope-Gallagher government to the business community is quite simple: tax it, tax it and tax it again. The most recent example of this attitude is the Stanhope-Gallagher government’s infrastructure tax. This is an extremely complex tax which raises a relatively small amount of funds and has annoyed everyone that it has touched, including people not even residing in the ACT.
This tax adds to the list of poor and failed taxes from this government, which has a record of almost complete failure, as the following analysis shows:
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