Page 2865 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
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The Treasurer claims to abolish duty, yet, as we look in the document, with respect to the take this government will get, if this budget goes through, over the next four years, of course we will see stamp duty increase. It is a fraud, because instead of abolishing stamp duty, as claimed, the tax take goes up. Indeed, the government’s own-source revenue goes up another five per cent. So much for tax reform! But it is a fraud and a reform that is already unravelling. And it is unravelling not even 24 hours after the budget was delivered by the Treasurer.
We saw a report on the ABC news last night with the headline “Budget cracks appear as the government spruiks its economic plan”. It unravels because the Treasurer did not do his job properly. He did not actually work out how this magical transition would occur. Already we see a Treasurer offering concessions because he knows that the criticisms from the Property Council and the Master Builders are correct. And he knows that what he has done is to drive away investment in the ACT.
So what does Mr Barr say? Mr Barr says that he will respond to these concerns. He says, “If there are particular transactions that are caught up in this particular change then we will adopt a flexible approach to ensure that they are able to continue.”
What is going on here? On the one hand we have Mr Barr, the Treasurer, in his Labor mode, saying that this is his first budget and it is all about long-held and longstanding Labor values. On the other hand the same Treasurer is saying that if there is a problem he will be flexible with the big end of town. This might be a sort of Chris Bowen-Gina Rinehart moment for the Treasurer where he will just flip and flop all over the place, as so often happens, to make sure that he is not caught out.
There is a contradiction in this government, and it is a contradiction in a government that has no idea about the details of the budget, and a government that is so quickly prepared to do deals with big business to ensure that the revenue it was counting on remains. And this is the whole point when you rush these things.
It is interesting, in this new era of openness and accountability, to see what was to happen after the tabling of the Quinlan review, in the government’s “next steps”, I think about 29 days ago. The next steps were:
The Government will hold roundtable discussions with the community over the next few months seeking feedback on the ACT Taxation Review, its recommendations and possible reforms moving forward.
So there we are in the first week of May: we are going to have consultation with the community for months. Yet not even a month later we have decided what we will do and we will move forward with our possible reforms. This is how the Treasurer got it wrong. Within 12 hours of tabling his budget, the flaws in it were apparent. Within 24 hours the backflips had begun and the unravelling of a budget that will continue to unravel had started to be exposed.
Let us just look at one of the other little sleights of hand that the Treasurer used. We saw Chris Bourke, as minister, exposed yesterday on the funding for kids with
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