Page 3220 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 21 August 2019
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benefit more from utilities concessions. For example, under the previous arrangements, a lot of utilities concessions were going to property owners rather than renters. So that was an important reform.
From the business perspective, we have removed stamp duty for around 70 per cent of commercial property transactions in this city and we have raised the payroll tax free threshold so that about 90 per cent of Canberra businesses do not pay any payroll tax at all. The savings across the board for those who are now no longer paying stamp duty is in the tens of thousands of dollars for average properties.
It is important, of course, to analyse what would have been the case if we had just left the tax policy settings the way they were in 2011. Stamp duty would have peaked at a number over half a billion dollars. General rates would have increased each year, the way they had for the previous century, at around four per cent, and stamp duty would have gone to over half a billion dollars. Insurance taxes would be raking in about $60 million annually and payroll taxes would be bringing in tens of millions of dollars extra if we had not undertaken those reforms. The mix of taxes would have been different in terms of how much revenue they collected, but the total amount of tax collected would be no different.
What we have avoided through these tax reforms is the sort of volatility and the sort of gouging that the New South Wales government in particular has been responsible for in relation to stamp duty. Nearly $10 billion was coming in to New South Wales government coffers from stamp duty—the worst tax that can be levied by state and territory governments.
Our population continues to grow very strongly. Our economy is the fastest growing in the nation. We have the lowest unemployment rate in this country. So our economy is performing very well. All of the naysaying and all of the doomsday predictions from the Leader of the Opposition that these reforms would lead to a mass exodus of people from Canberra have proved not to be the case.
We have thousands of additional businesses operating in the territory, a very rapid rate of growth. It is cheaper to set up a new business in Canberra because you would not be hit by payroll taxes and by commercial stamp duties if you were to purchase commercial property, particularly for small and medium enterprises.
Opposition members interjecting—
MR BARR: What we are seeing, in spite of the interjections from those opposite, is that the ACT economy has, for the last three years, grown at around four per cent per annum, faster than the rest of the nation, and in the last 12 months it was the fastest growing economy in the country. That reflects the fact that the economic policy settings for this jurisdiction are encouraging business development and employment creation. We are seeing a very strong labour market in a period when the commonwealth government, traditionally our largest employer, has in fact been shrinking.
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