Page 1781 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 2 May 2012
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For the Greens, it is a different case. I would have thought the Greens wanted transparency, openness and understanding, but apparently not. And the shame of it is that obviously nobody in the Greens or the Labor Party has read the Canberra Times article yesterday headed “Gallagher concedes tax hurting”. It is talking about housing taxes, property taxes, land taxes. The first paragraph says:
Chief Minister Katy Gallagher has conceded that territory’s tax regime could be hurting housing affordability in Canberra.
One of the biggest costs to households is the cost of the roof over their head, whether they are paying it off or whether they are renting it. And to exclude all those taxes and say they do not have any effect or a direct effect on you is to not understand what people in the ACT are going through. If the Greens and the Labor Party are that out of touch, then I think people come to understand that they stand for nothing but themselves. The article goes on, and it has the Chief Minister saying:
The other issue is tax and how we can look at our tax system and how there can be incentives to either provide low-cost rentals or low-cost housing.
I think some of the issues at the moment with our land tax and our stamp duty works against that kind of result.
There is an admission from the Chief Minister that their tax regime makes it harder for people in the ACT, that it does affect the cost of living. But of course, the Treasurer wants to exclude those taxes from this statement, and that is a shame. But it does go to the nature of the minister and it does go to the nature of the government.
Mr Barr criticised me for apparently having more detail in the explanatory statement than in the tax. That is always the case. That is why it is an explanatory statement. You do not put the speech into the black-letter law. You put the law there and if you need an interpretation of the law you come back to the member’s speech and to the explanatory statement to find out what was meant to be included and what was not.
I thought I was actually making it easy for the Treasurer by leaving it as a broad statement. He obviously does not understand. He thinks it is too hard. If he listened to the speech yesterday on the effects of the carbon tax, the biggest energy producer in WA are going to cop the carbon tax. But they are not paying it. They are just passing it straight on to the consumer. The head of Verve said, “This is a tax that will go on the bills.” So not to take into account where the tax is clearly passed on is to be in cloud-cuckoo-land in regard to what effect your tax regime has on ordinary people.
Of course, neither the Greens nor the Labor Party wanted this. Mr Hanson and I tried to get it into last year’s estimates report but the Greens and the Labor Party did not want it in the report. So it is in some of the dissenting comments that we made. We had a motion last year and the government agreed to vote against it. But Mr Seselja is right when he says the only reason they are doing this is that they know that the cost of living is a real issue for people in the ACT and they are now late to the game. The Canberra Liberals and Mr Seselja have been talking about the cost of living for the last 2½ to three years, but the government has been in denial that whole time, aided and abetted by the Greens.
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