Page 4584 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 31 October 2018
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We are very clear that our agenda—to continue to reform the territory’s taxation system, to achieve greater levels of economic efficiency, to encourage more new investment into the territory—remains our focus and will continue to be the case through this parliamentary term and beyond, I commend the amendment to the Assembly.
MS LE COUTEUR (Brindabella) (4.38): The Greens totally support the intent of Mr Coe’s motion, which is nothing more or less than a call for information. It has a bunch of notes at the beginning that you may or may not find are the things you want to note most about rates. Nonetheless, when you get down to the calls, he is calling for information. The Greens have always supported transparency; so of course we support the intent of Mr Coe’s motion.
We have a record of supporting Mr Coe and the Liberal Party on transparency, for example, the Dickson Tradies land swap documents in 2017 and Icon Water documents this year. Hopefully, we will be able to get something that actually works tomorrow as far as land acquisition goes. My office is working studiously with Mr Coe’s office and Mr Gentleman’s office on that as I speak.
We will, in fact, be supporting the ALP’s amendment because we think that it actually has more chance of resulting in transparency. I can see from Mr Coe’s motion that he is an optimist, because he used the word “modelling”. I know from past sad experience that the government’s definition of modelling does not line up with what anyone else thinks of as modelling. I believe that the government actually does modelling on rates, but my experience of this is that if you ask for modelling, the government will say, “No, what we did was not modelling,” and, therefore, they will not provide any documents.
We have been through this on a number of issues. This is why the Chief Minister’s office has promised that the words “original data and working analysis” are the magic words we want in this instance to actually provide the information that we are all looking for.
The other thing the ALP amendment does is bring forward delivery of the documents for the annual reports hearings. I understand that the government is of the belief that this will manage their workload in November. If that is the case, I cannot see how anyone would object to getting the information earlier rather than later.
They are basically the major differences between the two in terms of the actual guts, the calls. Both parties have some different notes in the beginning. Interestingly, note (e) in Mr Barr’s amendment is a rewrite of note (c) in Mr Coe’s motion. It just provides some more information. I guess the point that has been revealed by listening to both gentlemen speak on this is that, like so many things, you can have one set of facts. Depending on how you look at it and what other facts you bring to mind, you might think something is good or something is bad.
Mr Barr’s note (e), as I understand it, simply brings into this amendment more relevant facts. So the Greens support Mr Coe’s intention, which is to provide more
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