Page 2299 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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We have seen, Madam Speaker, that when it comes to those costs and charges, they are going up well beyond CPI. There is only a point at which we can sustain that. If you have costs and charges, if you have got rates, if you have got household bills that are going well beyond people’s wage increases, well beyond cost of living index increases, then you have a situation where that is unsustainable for families.
However, what we have is a budget that is driven by the great economic reformer Andrew Barr who does not really care about the effect on people. In his view, things like houses are just entities to be taxed. People are units of the economy, that you can go after and get as much money out of as you can. What we have from Mr Barr is a lack of care, a lack of compassion, a lack of understanding of the impact of this budget when it comes down to the effect on people.
Certainly I would encourage all of us to look at the cost of living statement that is in the budget. Again, I commend Mr Smyth for that initiative that now puts it in the budget, because every time this government spends, every time this government taxes, there is a rolldown effect to the people of Canberra. Eventually, that is borne by the average ratepayer—the average taxpayer, someone going to work, someone paying payroll tax, someone that has invested, a family trying to make ends meet and that has a unit and is paying land tax. They are just about to be stung by it.
I come back to rates. Let us be very clear about what happened in this rates debate. The government said repeatedly—repeatedly, Madam Speaker—during the last election campaign that rates would not triple. We said the opposite. We did not define a time period because the government would not offer one. The only evidence that was provided was the Quinlan tax review that had rates tripling in 10 years. We have now looked for other evidence and we have asked the government for a time frame. The government has then provided various scenarios that they tabled in the Assembly that indicate, depending on models of growth, what that level of increase will be.
It is clear, even on the lowest threshold, that rates will go up and that revenue from rates will go up fourfold and on their highest growth measure, seven fold. So when we said that rates are tripling, it turns out that it was a pretty conservative estimate. What we see in this budget is rates going up by about another 10 per cent. The average impact on people will be about $150. That is being applied, in the words of this government, progressively; so there will be a lot of people who will be paying a lot more in rates than simply the additional $150.
The problem is that many of those people are asset rich but income poor. These are, in many cases, older Canberrans who are living on bigger blocks. When they bought them, these were not fashionable suburbs. In many ways they were outer suburbs. It is people like those living in Weston, Farrer or Fadden. This is not the inner city elites at all. These people now, many of them retirees, many of them on fixed incomes, are seeing their rates bills going up by hundreds of dollars a year and they simply cannot afford it.
This government does not care. This government does not care about the impact. It is simply not fair. It is simply not fair for so many thousands—tens of thousands—of
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