Page 3449 - Week 11 - Thursday, 19 September 2013
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complicated and the community should be able to evaluate those reforms, including by being able to consider the material that has been prepared by Treasury to inform policy decisions.
I make the observation that anyone who is of a mind to do so can calculate the impacts of the reforms and work out what the various costs will be based on any assumptions one cares to make. All the necessary information is publicly available: total revenue, number of residential and commercial ratepayers and average suburb values, so you can break down the information by suburb, if you wish. The real point I am making is that the Liberal Party can work out the answer to any question about the reforms they wish to ask. If they want to know what the rates will be in any suburb in any year they can plug in the different policy assumptions and work it out. We have revenue forecasts for the next four years and beyond, and they can easily be extrapolated to give indicative numbers.
The point is that there seems to be a fixation on the part of the Liberal Party on these numbers, which does not really make sense if the intention is to genuinely debate the issue. Nevertheless, I think there should be a genuine public debate on the issue, and I think the community should have access to the material developed by Treasury to assist in the community’s understanding of these changes.
The Greens are committed to improving the transparency of government, and I have no doubt it is in the government’s best interest to provide more information to the community. The Greens, as we have stated on many occasions in this place, support the tax reform. The spectrum of possible impacts to the reforms is quite broad and I have no doubt the changes will evolve over the two decades of the implementation.
In terms of the amendment that I move, I have endeavoured to––
MADAM SPEAKER: Mr Rattenbury, you may speak to the amendment but you cannot move it until it has been circulated. It is being copied at this stage and has not yet been circulated.
MR RATTENBURY: I will move it at the end of my remarks, if that is agreeable.
MADAM SPEAKER: Yes, thank you.
MR RATTENBURY: The amendment better articulates the information that is actually useful to the community and about which there should be genuine debate. The reason I have sought to do this is that the motion Mr Smyth moved last time was very broad and I was unclear about what was being sought. I have endeavoured to define a bit more clearly what is being sought. I think the community has a right to access documents on the analysis of the impacts the taxation reforms implemented to date are expected to have over time, because that information is relevant. When it comes to tax reforms, it is plausible that any government in the ACT over the next 20 years can make a series of policy decisions that could shape the way rates are applied and the way the ACT raises revenue. They could adjust a whole lot of the parameters. This, of course, has been the discussion and debate that has gone on when it comes to the tax reforms over the last 12 months or so and in the scare campaigns that have been attached to it.
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