Page 997 - Week 03 - Thursday, 10 April 2014
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full stop. It is perhaps unfortunate that that did not occur. In consultation with industry, that would be their preference—that jurisdictions honour the agreement that led up to the introduction of the GST. The choice offered by the territory is simply to take duty on the long-term leases or to accept the new lease premium model. In consultation, industry has said that the lease premium model is the lesser of two evils but it does not believe that it will lead to people really understanding or believing that Canberra is open for business.
We need to use this bill to fix an unintended consequence of the earlier government initiative in 2009 which abolished short-term commercial leases. How often do we come back here to fix up short-term problems that are created by the Treasurer’s bills? We have consulted with industry regarding this bill. No oppositions have been made to the bill except for the fact that people do not believe the duty should be there at all, given the intergovernmental agreement of the early 2000s. That said, the government initiative does call for closer scrutiny.
We will support the bill. The real stick in the mud here is that we are about to pass this without knowing what the percentage will be. Maybe the Treasurer is going to jump up in his closing speech, tell us and allay all our fears. Again, it goes to that whole point that if you are going to put information in regulations, it is very hard. You truly have to take the government on trust. On a number of occasions, we have had to come back when that trust has not been met.
We would like to know, if the Treasurer would like to tell us this afternoon, what the premium that we are voting for is. What will the percentage be? In this new era of openness and accountability, we often hear the Chief Minister talk about open government. Why can’t you tell us before we vote on this what the premium will be? You have got the support. You know that the bill is getting up. There is a real openness issue here: what is the government up to?
We will support the bill. It closes another unintended consequence from a previous bill. We will keep a close eye on how this government implements this. I would not be surprised if, yet again, we come back to implement more change because the government still has not got the settings right.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.35): The Greens will be supporting this bill today. This is a very short and simple bill to amend the Duties Act. It is in line with the ACT government’s progressive implementation of the new ACT taxation system. At present our current legislation is structured to charge duties on conveyance of commercial leases that are longer than 30 years. This policy was created to attempt to ensure that companies were not making long leases instead of transferring or selling a property to avoid conveyance duty.
The current policy also includes covering cases whereby a lease is extended to over 30 years. Issues have arisen due to the fact that some lessees were being charged simply for having a long lease of perhaps 30 years or more or a lease with an extension then going over 30 years. These lessees were not necessarily avoiding conveyance duty just because they wanted a long lease.
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