Page 3453 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
more sustainable. We have had the clean economy strategy released this year, and now the challenge is to implement initiatives across government to realise the agreed objective here.
Treasury has an important role to play in this, in ensuring that government policy and expenditure create a market for sustainable products and services and assist us in reducing our reliance on the activity of the commonwealth. This is called diversifying the economy. Providing business assistance to help companies get started is very important, but nowhere near as important as creating a strong market for their products. The best thing we can do for producers of energy efficient products and smart architects and designers is require our homes to be more efficient. The best thing we can do for recycling companies is to educate people against putting their waste into landfill and make it easy for them to dispose of it in a way where it can be reused and recycled by businesses.
Treasury should have a role in helping other directorates change the way they do things—particularly, in the budget context, the way they spend public money. It should be noted that by all the traditional measures our economy is doing very well. This is in part attributable to the underlying nature of the economy and management advice that comes from our Treasury, and we should recognise that good work. I would also say, and I know I say it a lot, that we need to look beyond the traditional measures. Gross state product and state final demand are really very limited in what they tell us. We should be placing greater emphasis on other measures that better reflect how well our prosperity is distributed—measures that tell us about the practical impacts in our community.
The Greens will be supporting this line item in the budget.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (8.10): The centrepiece of the budget is the so-called courageous tax reform package of the Treasurer, the man born to reform the ACT’s tax system. These reforms essentially propose using the general rate system to raise revenue. This revenue will replace revenue which will be lost for abolishing some transaction-type taxes, such as duty on general life insurance and commercial land tax, and from phasing out some transaction-type taxes, such as duty on conveyances. Residential land tax will be retained, but it will be restructured.
This reform package is meant to be achieved over a 20-year period. Unfortunately, the government said that the reforms are only a five-year reform package; indeed, the revenue estimates cover only the three outyears. When we asked both the Treasurer and the Chief Minister for the data for the 20-year projections, we found that the work had not been done—that they only had the three years before us—and that if we wanted more detail we should go to the Quinlan tax review. It is not fair to tell people that their rates will go up when you have not done the work and you have not determined what their rates will look like over that 20-year period. This is what the government want us to believe. They want us to believe that the majority of people will be better off under this system, and it is just not true.
Any tax reform should be equitable across the community. It should lead to increased efficiencies in the taxing regime and it should be simpler to administer. The ACT
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video