Page 2242 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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Mr Barr is clearly floundering. For a much-vaunted clever economist, as he keeps telling us, his defining characteristic appears to be policy confusion combined with a good dose of self-aggrandisement.
That brings us to land-based taxes. I note that the principal recommendation from the Quinlan tax review is to implement a broad-based land tax. We will consider that proposal as we work through the report, but I note that Mr Barr said on Monday that the Henry report was generally well accepted. Perhaps Mr Barr has a short memory. Perhaps Mr Barr is trying to rewrite history. Consider comments from some of Mr Barr’s Labor colleagues on this. The states in the main actually rejected the proposal for a broad-based land tax. There was an article in the Australian on 4 May 2010 where the then South Australian Treasurer, Kevin Foley, said that they rejected the review’s findings—that there was no place for stamp duties in the 21st century tax system. Foley said that a broad-based land tax would be a punitive tax on families and households and would not be supported by his government.
A spokesman for the Victorian Treasurer complained that Canberra was responsible for the inefficient tax base. Queensland’s Andrew Fraser was non-committal. He said the government had repeatedly delivered stamp duty benefits to consumers in an effort to remain competitive with other states, but that people had accepted Henry. I think a lot of commentators accepted Henry. Certainly governments did not do it. What did all the state Labor people say at the time of the Henry report in 2010? “Not interested.” The response of the Labor states was universal. They followed the leader, the Rudd government, by trying to kill the Henry review of the tax system. As I have said, Foley, Lenders and others said they were not going to do it.
So while all the other states repudiated and moved towards a land-based tax system, we have now got an ACT Labor Treasurer who apparently supports that. It is interesting, because Mr Barr put in a submission on a tax plan for our future. There was a tax forum. Mr Barr’s document was a statement of reform priorities. Mr Barr has probably forgotten his statement. In the second-last paragraph on the first page it says:
A robust taxation system should not be singularly reliant on a particular base. Noting the benefits of taxing land, the ACT has a preference for a somewhat diversified revenue base. Moving towards a single revenue source can create significant risk.
So there we are. Back in October 2011 he said:
Moving towards a single revenue source can create significant risk.
But what are we doing? Moving towards a single revenue base, confirming this government’s reliance on taxing land, this government’s addiction to taxing land. Land and property—that is what it is about. We have not got any other ideas in the kit, so what do we do? We will go back to the land.
Ms Hunter was reported in the paper on Tuesday morning as saying:
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