Page 3238 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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I understand that there are unpublished interlocutory decisions that do disagree with particular elements of decisions, but I cannot see how they amount to fundamental misapplications of the law or support the argument that the commissioner is not accepting decisions, because if that were the case why then did the matter not proceed to final judgement?
If the commissioner’s decisions are incorrect, I fail to understand why taxpayers are not challenging them in the courts and winning, particularly given the sums of money concerned. This is what happens in relation to every other administrative decision. People subject to those decisions have a right to judicial review if they feel those decisions are incorrect, and that is the proper place to deal with this issue; that is, in the courts, not in this parliament.
I cannot see how we can possibly support the assertions in the motion when there is no evidence, or I certainly have not seen evidence, to back them up. I have no doubt that there are taxpayers who do not feel that the tax liability that they have been issued with is the amount that they should pay, and I also have no doubt that the commission could do things better. But that really should not be enough for us to forgo the taxation revenue as proposed in this motion.
What would happen if the commonwealth Treasurer decided to direct the ATO not to prosecute people for not paying their tax? It would be a ridiculous situation. And imagine if Mr Smyth decided that he did not like one of our criminal laws and put up a motion asking the DPP not to prosecute it. It is just a ridiculous thing to try and do things in this way.
It does raise a real concern about how the Canberra Liberals think our system of government works and what value they place on the separation of powers. It is just a bad idea for this place to start doing this sort of thing. There are appropriate mechanisms to ensure that decision makers act lawfully. If Mr Smyth has an issue with the way the law itself operates or the way the accountability mechanisms work, he should propose reforms, table a bill to change the law. Motions like this are just not the way to go about sorting out these sorts of issues.
One other claim in the motion is that the commissioner is slow in making decisions on payroll tax. I did put this to the commissioner and the office for revenue and they accepted that, particularly for the complex cases, on some occasions they were slow at making decisions. But they made the point that there is a published list of time frames in which decisions are made and that they have complied with those time frames. They did recognise that the time frames were quite long and said that work was being done to attempt to improve the decision-making process. I look forward to hearing about progress on that work.
If anything, surely the more responsible route to address this type of concern would have been to provide greater resources to the Revenue Office, or call on the minister to take steps to change the office to make it able to make those decisions in a more timely manner, rather than just directing it not to pursue the money that the territory is rightly entitled to.
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