Page 831 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 22 March 2017
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the right things by keeping their property in the market. This motion is targeting the other vacant properties which are not counted in that minor 1.1 per cent rental vacancy rate. It is about the properties that are idle, that are not advertised or marketed in any way.
Why am I focusing on land tax in this motion? Land tax in the ACT is a tax which is targeted to the majority of landlords who do the right thing and rent out their investment properties. Those who withhold their properties from the market do not pay it. This just does not make sense.
Land tax treatments have been an issue of concern for me for many years. Back in 2008 when I was last in the Assembly, the development of a land tax concession scheme for rental properties where they had been rented at an affordable rate to low income families was an item in the Greens-ALP parliamentary agreement. This was not implemented as we envisaged, unfortunately, but I do note that in the 2012 budget land tax was reduced for landlords who rent out low or medium value properties.
The following parliamentary agreement, the 2012 one, also included an item to investigate options for reform of taxation treatment of rental properties to encourage landlords to increase the energy efficiency rating for rental properties. My point is that land tax issues have always been an issue for the Greens. This continues our attempts to make sure that land tax is an issue that we deal with more sensibly in the ACT.
On that note, as members may know, my first degree was in economics. I studied this because it seemed to me that economics plays a big part in determining social justice and in determining what happens to people’s lives. I still believe that. That is one of the reasons I have been pursuing changes to our land tax system. It seems wrong to me that only landlords pay land tax and that those costs are passed on to people so that the only people who actually pay land tax are, of course, tenants.
What I am calling for in this motion is improvements in the land tax system that will encourage property owners to rent out their properties. This will therefore add to the size of the rental market. Instead of land tax being a burden, you only pay if you rent your house. It will become a level playing field. Rent it out and pay land tax or do not rent it out and you still have to pay land tax, assuming, of course, that you are not living in your property.
The system I am calling for would simplify the approach and it would include all investment properties, regardless of their vacancy status. In putting forward the motion today, it is beyond me why we cannot do here what other governments are doing throughout Australia. All state and territory governments in Australia, except the Northern Territory, impose a land tax. In the Northern Territory there is no land tax at all. In most other jurisdictions, land tax is based on the total or accumulative value of all unimproved land that you own, other than your principal place of residence in a particular state.
So there are two important differences in land tax between the ACT and the norm in the rest of Australia. First, in other states you are liable for land tax if you are a property owner, but there are certain circumstances under which you are exempt. For
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