Page 534 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 March 2014
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want it to do. But we have set out to support employment in the territory to hopefully give some of those developments that are in that consideration stage, but which maybe have not crossed the line, the confidence that the government is listening to them, that the government is working with them. Where it adds up—that is, with the public interest test firmly at the front of our mind, the fairness test firmly at the front of our mind—we will work and we will intervene to help. That is what this package is about.
Let us run the public interest test over this and let us see the data that the government used that said that this will stimulate the economy. We have already got the admission that the Chief Minister will not tell us how many jobs it will create; so what is it that drove the government to make these changes? It would be interesting to know what data they used to inform their decision, or was this the public interest test where firmly in the front of their minds was the future of the government? There is a lot of doubt about these taxes in the community.
I am pleased Mr Rattenbury is still with us because LVC, Mr Rattenbury, is a tax on the environment. LVC is stopping density and pushing sprawl. I would have thought that that was against the Greens’ policy. We have had the Greens in here for decades talking about the need to stop the urban sprawl. Yet if you cannot develop in the inner city, there is only one place you can go, and that is new developments.
So to bring forward the development of Moncrieff and say that we are stimulating the economy I would have thought would have been counter-intuitive for a Green who does not want further greenfield development but who ideally wants a more dense city. The LVC is the anti-city tax. That is what it is; it is the perfect tax against density. That is all it is perfect for. The LVC stops density.
We see this in Mr Coe’s motion where he states:
the Government’s “stimulus package” is an admission that their fiscal policies have failed;
Yes, they have. They have failed. Not only have they failed; we now cannot be told by the government what they will deliver because they just do not know. Either they have made these decisions without any data, without any input or without any review or they have got the review and they will not release it. I think it is very important that we get the data.
If we go back to the 2010-11 budget, the perfect tax, as Mr Barr described it, was to deliver $22 million in 2011-12. It was to deliver $25 million in 2012-13 and it was to deliver $26 million in 2013-14. We then go to the 2013-14 budget and see what the expected outcome is: it is now $17 million. It is $17 million against an estimate of $26 million. We can see that in the outyear 2014-15 it is now $18 million; in 2015-16 it is $19 million; in 2016-17 it is $20 million, which does not even bring the perfect tax up to the level it was expected to reach for its first year of operation.
It is not a perfect tax, members. It is the perfect failure. Indeed, in the public accounts committee hearing I went on to say, after Mr Barr had said:
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