Statutes Amendment and Repeal (Budget 2015) Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (16:09): It is always a pleasure to speak on budget measures bills. Unfortunately, I am not the lead speaker.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: You are the lead speaker.

Ms CHAPMAN: Am I? That just gives me joy. It is a joy to my heart to hear that. This is a bill which purports to introduce a number of measures to facilitate the Treasurer's announcements on 18 June 2015 in his budget.

He gave a glorious speech and tabled a budget; I think now, of about nine volumes. I always love reading the budget each year. I hope to get through all the photographs. The new Treasurer has a new style, a little different from the now Minister for Health. He had pictures of his family. It was very different from the Premier, when he was treasurer. He just made a whole list of promises. Now we have photographs of everyone else and an even longer list of promises, but in that there were a number of key elements that require legislative reform to facilitate the promises made by the Treasurer.

A number of those surround the Land Tax Act, which provides for a waiver or refund of land tax for residential land in certain cases, providing some reform in that area. Significantly, there are a number of amendments to the Stamp Duties Act to accommodate a number of initiatives, but those I want to make comment about today are the amendments to the Supreme Court Act 1935 and the proposed introduction of a graduated scheme of payments that need to be made to the probate office of the Supreme Court when one seeks to have a will probated or validated by order of that court.

It is a process which other laws require to be undertaken—that is, proof of the validity of the will of a person who is deceased to accommodate the then application of real estate. For example, the Registrar of the Lands Titles Office will not (and is in fact unable to) deal with land or transfer it pursuant to the terms of a will unless a probated copy of the will is presented for the purposes of supporting the transfer. That is a process that is required for the dealing of a number of assets. A number of banks require a probated will before they will even deal with investments in their institutions and the application of those toward the applicant beneficiary.

For most cases, when someone dies, the arrangements and the transfer of the assets of the deceased to the beneficiaries is a relatively simple process to the extent that the beneficiaries are known, there is no dispute between people who are not named as beneficiaries in the will, the executor who has been appointed is alive and of sound mind and able to undertake the duties to distribute the estate according to the terms of the will and is largely uncontroversial. Nevertheless, if you own real estate—and that is something that we encourage in this state—if you pass away with real estate, then it is necessary to have this will probated. It is an unavoidable application in many estates and it is also one where it is necessary to apply if for any reason there is no valid will or no will at all. Letters of administration need to be considered and the approval to distribute the deceased's estate require again approval through a court process.

I think it is fair to say when in the process of these dealings of the wills, an application is made, an affidavit is usually presented with the last known allegedly valid will of the deceased and/or the circumstances surrounding the need to have an administration order. They are presented and, if it is for the approval of the will with the supporting documentation, someone then in the probate office checks the will.

It has to be in writing, it has to be legible, it has to be signed by the deceased, it has to be witnessed by two parties, etc., and there are a whole lot of rules that apply to making the will valid on the face of it. Usually, in the absence of any objection—that is, some other person who might come forward to try to claim that the will was executed by the deceased when they were not of sound mind, under duress, or some other explanation, or they claim that they have missed out, they are unhappy with the terms of the will in some way and the share that has been apportioned to them might raise an objection—it is a pretty straightforward process.

It is fair to say, as someone who has practised law, that it is an irritating process if one gets back a request from the probate office to provide some extra scintilla of useless information that is required to support the application that has been omitted, or a comma is in the wrong spot. It is a bit like having Supreme Court orders that used to come back from pernickety masters or judges who would write in red all over them, usually changing one's grammar in the draft order that had been submitted. Irritating as that might be, nevertheless, it is a process which is important, but in the large majority of cases relatively straightforward. For the privilege of having that occur—which is necessary to be able to distribute the estate, for the widow to get the estate, for the children to be fed by withdrawing money from the account, etc.—this process has to occur.

What is the current process? The current process is that you pay a fee to the probate office for that exercise of assessment and scrutiny to take place. On the information that we have gleaned initially from other legal practitioners, which we raised during the estimates period, and the briefings that we had on this—and I thank those from the Treasurer's office who provided briefings and at the time there were a number of agencies represented—it was confirmed at that stage that about $6 million a year comes into the Supreme Court as revenue from applications for probating wills, and about $2 million a year is the estimated cost of operating that division in the Supreme Court.

So, it came as a bit of a surprise to find that the Treasurer decided that he was going to impose a new graduated scheme which would require, depending on the value of the estate, paying an ever-increasing fee according to the increasing value of the estate. Whilst it was claimed to be justified as being part of the graduated scheme, similar to the one that operates in New South Wales, it was pretty clear, initially to legal practitioners in South Australia, that just over the border in Victoria we were going to have this ludicrous situation where for an estate worth $1 million it would be $300 but thousands of dollars under the new application that would apply in South Australia.

When it was presented as a fee-for-service, user-pays, I thought that on the face of it they are already making $4 million a year out of it. We had a similar user-pays situation, I remember, over fishing licences and the department for primary industry. There was an expectation that for those who might be in business and require a licence or a permit for the purposes of their fishing the cost of providing the regulatory officers and personnel to provide, supervise and regulate the licensing and permit system needed to be paid for, and therefore that was a significant factor in the allocation of the cost; so it is a cost-recovery type system.

In the Supreme Court, it seems on the information we are provided with that they are already making a handsome profit out of the dead. Millions a year are being made out of the harvesting of probate fees for the purposes of providing this service, so it is a little concerning to find that they would move to a system where there would be even greater harvesting of money into the Treasury coffers as a result of this imposition.

The provision under this bill which provides for amendments to the Supreme Court Act, which of course, is tucked away neatly at the end of this bill, states:

Fees charged in respect of proceedings, or any step in proceedings, in the court's probate jurisdiction may be based on the value of the deceased person's estate or any other basis, whether or not the fee exceeds the actual administrative cost incurred.

There it is in black and white. It does not matter what it costs, the fee can be charged based on a person's estate, or any other basis, and that is open chequebook, it seems to me, for provision of money to prop up the government's budget deficits in respect of the management of government services. It just seems to me quite ill disciplined for any government or treasurer to come in and expect that we would be in favour of this type of open chequebook arrangement, that we would be expected to sign up to something which is going to provide millions of dollars more per year which then can be applied as the Treasurer sees fit.

I expect the Treasurer will walk in here and say, 'Well, look, the cost of justice is very expensive. We have to provide for a number of services, not just probate services. Sometimes we have to provide expensive criminal proceedings or even civil cases that go for years, and we need to take up an enormous amount of court time, and the cost of all that is very expensive so this will help support that.'

That may be the case. I would probably feel a bit happier if that was the case if we had a full complement of judges, if we were able to get onto the superior court trials a bit more quickly than we are and further that we would even have a new courts building, but pretty clearly the application of these funds to go into the pool is designed to ensure that more money comes into the Courts Administration Authority and therefore there is less money that Mr Koutsantonis has to write out in his allocated budget for that important service.

It is a raping of the dead to pay for the ill discipline and incompetence in the financial management by the government, and I think it is shame on them that they should be expecting that we warmly embrace this as a piece of legislative reform to support it. In respect of the other matters, there is the removal of the River Murray levy. All I can say about that is, about damn time.

The drought—I do not know whether the government has been aware of this or not, or whether they realised it—has been over for years, and year after year the opposition has said that it is not acceptable that the River Murray levy continues to be harvested from people in South Australia, many of whom did not even get access to water that had come through the River Murray scheme. People on the West Coast who are not linked up to River Murray water and people on Kangaroo Island who did not get any River Murray water are all expected to pay the River Murray levy.

I can remember, early in the 13 years since I came here, having a very late night debate with the then treasurer, the Hon. Kevin Foley, about this River Murray levy. We were in the early period of what became a decade-long drought. South Australia was concerned about its capacity to provide metropolitan water services to Adelaideans and it was very concerned about the environmental impact, particularly on the River Murray system, as a result of there being a sustained drought.

Every South Australian was worried about it. The government's answer was to implement a River Murray levy and there was some justification for that at the time. I can remember saying, in questioning the then treasurer, 'Is this going to be applied to new initiatives to provide for the support of the River Murray over and above the government's obligation to contribute to the Murray-Darling Basin plan?'

I am not sure what it was actually called at that stage. Certainly, representative states—particularly New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, which obviously all had an interest in the health of the River Murray and, indeed, the Darling system—provided funds into an authority which then managed the maintenance and repair of the lock system and generally administered the water as a major resource.

From there, of course, there were various other corporate entities, mostly, which acquired the right to be able to remove water and onsell it to food producers and a multitude of towns along the whole Murray system. His very clear position was that this would be for new initiatives. This would be because we were in a crisis and we needed to have provision for this River Murray levy, as it was called.

It was one of the first levies I had ever heard of. There have been plenty more since, I might say, in the time I have been here, but this one was going to be applicable across South Australia for anyone who owned a property. I think there was some argy-bargy over whether it should apply over other chattels, such as boats and the like, but in any event, it was to be universal across South Australia as distinct from particular regions, and it was to be applied for the purposes of dealing with the extreme drought circumstances which the state faced.

I am utterly disgusted that in recent years when I have read the annual budget report to parliament that, in fact, significant amounts of this money have been applied to programs which have been the ordinary business of government, particularly the Department of Environment and their obligation to provide for and maintain the infrastructure of the Murray-Darling system. I am utterly disgusted. It is typical of what this government does—introduce a new tax or levy and then apply it to whatever it likes.

Again, it is a shameful situation that the government has abused, I think, the privilege and generally the goodwill of the people of South Australia who were saying, 'Well, look, we don't like paying a levy, but we're in the grips of a drought and we're prepared to support to save this iconic reserve and water resource for South Australia and we will help pay,' only to find that the government used it as an excuse to walk away from its responsibility to provide its normal obligations and use this levy for that purpose. It is disgraceful, but it is just so indicative of what the government has done over a period of time. It is just one further example. I note that at least it is being removed.

There is another levy—the Hindmarsh Island Bridge levy. The whole Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act 1999 is to be repealed and the liability to make a payment in relation to that is also to be abolished, and that is what we are here for today.

I am told that the fund that was established for the purposes of receiving a levy payment has well and truly expired, I suspect because of two reasons: one, there has not been any recent movement on the sale of property in this area; and/or two, the government want to be able to promote the opportunity for development on Hindmarsh Island, and one way to relieve the pressure on it is to abandon this levy and hope that that might initiate landowners particularly or investors on Hindmarsh Island to proceed with developments and offer for sale and/or expand existing developments on the island.

I do not take any issue with that. What concerns me is that the government just come along and say, 'We don't need this levy anymore.' There does not appear to be any real reason for that other than what I have been told in the briefings which is that, really, there is not much chance of getting anymore. I do not quite understand how that works, but it is apparently fully allocated to the extent of being able to recover under the current ownership arrangements and there does not appear to be any expectation that there will be any further significant revenue coming into it.

So, we just close the fund. I do not know what is going to happen with the proceeds of this fund. I suspect they disappear into the ether of the Treasurer's opportunity basket with whatever he wants to promote and, again, its purpose is extinguished.

I do not propose to make any comment on the other Stamp Duties Act amendments. I have had a briefing from Treasury officials in respect of those. They appear to be some minor amendments to tidy up provisions which we discussed, and that is acceptable to us. There are some anti-avoidance provisions which have also been adequately explained and are, we think, appropriate in the circumstances.

The government, I think, have overall failed to satisfy South Australians that their budget is a responsible plan for the 12 months of the financial year that we are currently in. They have utterly failed to provide any hope to South Australians of job opportunities or of infrastructure that will help support job opportunities, or indicate any fiscal discipline that the public are expecting of the government in relation to their expenditure. It should be responsible, it should be measured, it should be targeted and, in every sense, this budget fails.

I note that this is the last occasion that our house will have an opportunity to contribute to the debate in respect of the budget. It is singularly the most significant financial bill that goes through this house each year. We discuss it at appropriation level to facilitate the ongoing meeting of services and public servant salaries, etc. We have an opportunity to consider it in the budget in reply legislation of the budget bill and now, in this third tranche of legislative machinery for the purposes of implementing the budget, is the last opportunity we have to discuss this important measure for South Australians. I am bitterly disappointed and I know other South Australians are and certainly we would live in hope that there will be some improvement next year. I am not confident that will occur.

I will say that I am mindful of the very significant contribution that the Australian government has contributed in its budget to supplement very significantly the cost of infrastructure build, particularly the roads and the Darlington and Torrens to Torrens part of the South Road corridor infrastructure. I think that is very important and, frankly, if we did not have it there would be a gaping hole in the infrastructure for South Australia from the state government.

Really their token contribution is to provide for an O-Bahn service upgrade at the city end of that service. I think we are up to mark 4 of the proposal in that regard and it is a project which is to be presented for consideration to our Public Works Committee and then, of course, apparently to be implemented later this year. If that is the best they can do, that is a disgrace.

I find it unconscionable that the Chief Executive of the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure, Mr Deegan, has come to this parliament and provided his evidence to a committee to suggest that we have an overallocation in respect of our electric trains to the extent of five with the fifth one coming online shortly. To find that we have a wastage of some $50 million of idle infrastructure sickens me because there are so many organisations and people in South Australia who are desperate for just a small lick of money to enable them to support, often combined with a voluntary service, other services for South Australians.

They need just a tiny little bit, yet we have $50 million worth of trains that are sitting somewhere between Seaford, Adelaide and Dry Creek. Of course, in question time today the minister did not have a clue even where they were, but they are somewhere out there, if not being graffitied, apparently in some sort of secure storage in one of those three depots.

I find the budget to be irresponsible, certainly inconsistent in its approach, without any objective of ensuring that we have employment for South Australians, and ultimately raping from the dead to make provision for the living because the government is so incompetent.

Mr DULUK (Davenport) (16:38): I also rise to speak to the Statutes Amendment and Repeal (Budget 2015) Bill and to understand where the 2015 budget is and what the government is trying to do over the next 12 months. I commend them in many areas such as looking at winding back some of the stamp duty provisions and even the Save the River Murray levy which is very honourable, but we need to look at why we are where we are today and how things have come about.

After 13 years of Labor governance in this state presiding over the coffers here, there is not a lot to show for it. The situation that we find ourselves in today is as a result of poor decision-making in years gone by and a lack of financial management over the journey.

South Australia today has the worst unemployment in the country at 7.9 per cent, and we are heading slowly, on trend, to double-digit unemployment. It is completely unacceptable. Over 70,000 South Australians are unemployed and many more are underemployed. Only 3,982 jobs have been created since the Labor government promised 100,000 extra jobs in February 2010; and 4,400 mining jobs have been lost since last November when this government promised to create an extra 5,000 jobs in that industry.

Our ABS figures as recently as August show mining exploration collapsing in South Australia at a faster rate than anywhere else in the country. Mining and petroleum exploration in South Australia has fallen from $647.7 million in 2013-14 to $486.3 million in 2014-15. That is a loss of over $161 million in exploration investment in mining in South Australia. That is just more bad news for the state economy.

Northern Adelaide has an unemployment rate of around 9 per cent and this is before the closure of Holden due next year. In a recent estimates hearing, the Minister for Automotive Transformation revealed that only $14.9 million of the $22 million budgeted for Our Jobs Plan has been spent in the first two years of the program and, indeed, there are many other issues on the table in terms of unemployment. We have got the closure of the Alinta Leigh Creek facility and power station in Port Augusta and, of course, all the issues at the moment with Arrium in Whyalla.

As I said before, to understand the problem today we need to go back into the past. There are many other jurisdictions in Australia right now that are actually doing very well. I was fortunate enough to be in Melbourne on the June long weekend visiting my sister and family. My sister is one of the thousands of young South Australians who no longer call South Australia home because there are not employment opportunities for them. When visiting my sister in Melbourne (and I had not been to Melbourne for a while), I could not believe how much building and development was happening in that city. One thing that struck me was the number of young people around the CBD enjoying the night-life that Melbourne has to offer as well.

I hark back to South Australia and I think: what is going on? Something is happening right in Melbourne: something is not happening right in South Australia. Quite often from those opposite we hear the blame being put on the federal Coalition government for the malaise of the South Australian economy, but it is actually quite the opposite. It is not the federal government's fault that South Australia is in the predicament that it is because that theory does not apply to Tasmania and New South Wales whose economies are leading the nation and house prices are leading the nation. Queensland is on its recovery, the Northern Territory is doing very well off historical levels and Western Australia is doing what it always does.

So we look back here to South Australia and the only thing that is different is, obviously, we have had 13 years of Labor government in South Australia that have produced six of the last seven budgets in deficit. It is 13 years of a Labor record that has seen the state have $13.2 billion of debt which, of course, breaks the State Bank record. It is 13 years of Labor government that has seen $1.4 million a day wasted paying interest on Labor's debt. We have the highest unemployment in the nation. Even Tasmania is beating us. Quite often in South Australia we have used Tasmania, given that we are two of the smaller states, as our benchmark and, right now, we are failing in our own benchmarking and it is an absolute disgrace. We have had privatisation of assets in this state—ForestrySA, Motor Accident Commission and SA Lotteries.

During that time—and this is the irony—the Labor government has received $858 million in extra funding from the commonwealth by way of an increase in GST payments; and what do we have to show for an increase in GST payments? We have seen the knife being taken to our health system. We have seen the closure of the Repatriation General Hospital. This is a hospital that has served the community so well for so many years and I think, as of today, over 118,000 signatures have been collected by South Australians to protest the government's decision; yet, what I believe to be one of the highest ever petitions signed by South Australians has been completely and utterly ignored by the government.

That goes to its hubris. It is not listening to the professionals and it is not listening to the people. Today in InDaily there was a very good article that quoted Emeritus Professor Ian Maddocks, who established the palliative care system at Daw Park hospice and is a long-time professor at Flinders University and Flinders hospital, as saying this decision to relocate the Daw Park hospice from the Repatriation site is an absolute shame and a disgrace and will not lead to better patient outcomes. I would rather take the advice of eminent South Australians, a former older—

Mr Speirs: Senior.

Mr DULUK: —Senior Australian of the Year, thank you member for Bright, than I would some bureaucrats in the department. So, we have seen a massive increase in funding from the federal government yet we have seen a Labor government in this state happy to take the knife to our public health system.

Labor, of course, has failed to deliver on numerous projects that it has promised: the Outer Harbor electrification line; the Gawler line; and, of course, the new Adelaide high school is rescoped every now and then. We are not actually quite sure when it will be built, but the promise at the last election to build the new school at the old Royal Adelaide Hospital site is not going to happen; and, of course, over the same 13-year period we have seen a $3.9 billion increase in unbudgeted expenditure.

So, we have had 13 years to paint the narrative here for the people of South Australia. We have had 13 years of poor economic management, and we are here in 2015 discussing the budgets as we did in the July session, and now the amendments and the repeal bill specifically today, and we wonder why we are where we are today.

We wonder why this government is making the decisions that it is making, and it is all basically because it had the inability to make strong, tough, needed decisions in previous years. I suppose a good lesson for all of us in this house is that you always need to be planning, you always need to be reforming; and whilst I do, as I said before, give some credit to the current Treasurer for starting to make some decisions in regard to removal of stamp duty on transactions, it is all a little bit too little too late.

Right now we are trying to put through this budget that is going to get the South Australian economy back on track. Well, it is quite the opposite. This will not be happening. In terms of some other indicators, we have a poor performance in the construction industry and, of course, this is reflected in reduced employment opportunities in this area. Housing start-ups are one of the lowest in the nation. On every economic indicator we are in decline.

Our exports have fallen by 8.1 per cent on an analysed basis. Our national export market share has dropped steadily from 7.5 per cent in 2002 to 4.2 per cent in June 2015. In that time the whole Australian economy has grown yet our export market has declined, and for South Australia to be strong we need to have a strong export market. We just cannot be selling lattes to each other. We cannot all be journalists, we cannot all be football players. We actually need to create some productive investment and productive industries, and exports are one of those industries which really bring foreign investment to the state to create jobs and to help many South Australians.

We have seen a 30 per cent (or $1.04 billion) decline in South Australian exports to China in the last 12 months. So, we have seen a reduction in SA exports to China, which is Australia's biggest export market, a very important market. What really concerns me the most at the moment is that we have a federal Labor opposition in conjunction with its union mates—especially the CFMEU, the most militant wing of the union movement which controls a lot of members in the ALP, especially in Victoria—putting at risk South Australian jobs, South Australian export markets but holding up the signing of the FTA in the Senate.

The best thing that the government in South Australia can do is to get on the phone to the federal opposition leader, Bill Shorten, and get on the phone to Chris Bowen, the federal opposition treasurer, and encourage them—demand, in fact—that the Labor Party in the federal parliament support the passing of the FTA legislation in order for South Australian exporters to have the best possible opportunity to get their product into Chinese markets—Chinese markets that will help our wine industry, help our agricultural industry and help our farming sectors overall.

There has been a bit of talk about the FTA of late and a lot of fear in my mind about it. I think that, in its heart of hearts, the state government does know that the FTA will be good for South Australia. We all know, Business SA knows it and many of the leading economists know it, yet the state Labor Party will not convince their federal counterparts to help South Australian exporters. It is a real concern for me that we can see good policy, because we all support trade. As we are moving out of heavy manufacturing, as we are at the moment, and transitioning from it, it is most important that we do look at other industries, and exports is certainly one of those industries. China is our biggest market, but of course it is not just China, it is into South Korea, it is into Japan, it is work that we are doing with India now, and the like.

Getting back to this budget, we are seeing more increases in taxes and levies across this budget. It is a real shame, and the deputy leader was reflecting on this in her contribution. We are seeing the budget being propped up by taxes here, levies there and transactions being taxed. South Australians going about their ordinary business, people who are investing, people who are transacting, stamp duty, conveyancing charges, things that contribute to a productive economy are being slugged at every turn because that is all the government knows what to do.

We are losing young South Australians, we are losing taxpayers. We are seeing the closing of the Alinta site at Port Augusta, a plant and industry that employs hundreds of people in very well-paid (six-figure salary) jobs. They are leaving South Australia and with them they are taking what they would contribute in tax. We are seeing a shrinking of our tax base in South Australia, so the only way this government can increase the tax to pay for its $13.2 billion of debt and the servicing of that debt is to pretty much tax day-to-day transactions of South Australians. It is an absolute disgrace.

The budget that was passed in July was meant to be about jobs, jobs, jobs. For me, the mantra for all of us as legislators should be about jobs, jobs, jobs, but this budget is only predicting a 1 per cent employment growth in South Australia, the worst of all mainland states. We are not going to come back to being a leading growth state which has the opportunity to have well funded schools, universities and hospitals if we do not have strong economic growth, and that of course includes employment growth. One per cent just does not cut it.

We need to address the high cost of employment. We need to address the high cost of doing business in South Australia. Previous to entering parliament many would know that I worked in small business and business banking. I recall a conversation I had with one of my clients, who said, 'Sam, we're leaving South Australia to move our operation to Victoria.' I said, 'Why are you doing that?' He said, 'Well, South Australia has the worst WorkCover levies in the country and has the highest energy costs as well.'

Whilst we have the highest energy costs and whilst we have a terrible and inefficient WorkCover scheme that too often penalises very well meaning employers and, at the same time, does not do enough to get people returning to work, we are going to be shooting ourselves in the foot, so to speak. We have a very high cost of doing business in South Australia. We need to be a low cost business jurisdiction. We need to be looking at the opportunities we do have. We actually have a lot of opportunity in terms of commercial and industrial real estate that we could be using as a way of creating incentives for South Australian businesses.

As has been urged by many on this side, I urge the government to commit to reducing payroll tax and to reverse the $90 million ESL hike, which is really just another grab at South Australian households. What really gets me about the ESL is that if the majority of the ESL went to supporting the CFS and our volunteer fire service the average South Australian punter would say, 'Well, that seems reasonable. I'm happy to pay a levy that ensures that our volunteer firefighters are well equipped, have the latest equipment, have the latest tankers,' but it is actually quite the opposite.

The Sturt group, which is the brigade in my electorate, which is a wonderful brigade, up until January of this year was fundraising for new appliances. What a disgrace that they have to have 'Donate to the CFS' boxes at the local bakery, the post office and the bank. The community is very willing to donate but this should not be happening because we have an ESL. So, the irony is that we have an emergency services levy that does not support our emergency services.

Bringing forward the planned stamp duty relief to take effect this year would be a wonderful thing for the government to do and, by doing that, we would stop a delay in transactions which might be happening. On average, 20,000 to 30,000 of South Australia's best and brightest have been forced to move interstate each year, also creating long-term structural issues for our state. We have the highest utility prices in the nation, some of the highest in the world, and this government is obsessed with pet projects. They deliver little economic benefit and are delivered at enormous cost to the taxpayers. We only ever hear that the major projects are over time and over budget from this government. We should be focused on making South Australia internationally competitive. We should always aim, not only for Australian but international best practice when it comes to policy-making. I suppose these are just some of the issues for me.

In recent months we have seen the terrible decision in terms of our vocational education and training (VET) sector which has just had its confidence ripped out by this government. It lacks policy focus, so we are not even skilling up our best and brightest. In today's paper, Nigel McBride, head of Business SA, had a great article highlighting the difference between the federal Coalition government and the state government's approach to apprentices and how the state government is not doing enough for apprenticeships in South Australia and how in our VET and higher education programs we are creating uncertainty in the skills base.

One thing when it comes to VET is the hypocrisy of the government, and a good case in point is how VET has been destroyed in terms of teaching VET music in the southern suburbs at Noarlunga. Noarlunga TAFE's music program has been dismantled in the member for Kaurna's seat. If you want to do VET music, you have to go to the Salisbury TAFE campus. I love it, how this whole revamp of vocational education and training is actually not delivering a better result for the average South Australian. I have been contacted by many people who have been in the VET program at Noarlunga TAFE and who can no longer do that because they have to travel to Salisbury, some 50 kilometres away, to undertake that training. That is a real disgrace.

In conclusion, South Australians deserve better. The economic mismanagement of the taxpayers' money by this government is unreal and it has been happening for 13 years. That is the real problem. It is the legacy of those opposite—leaving the state in economic and financial ruin which has led to fire sales of our assets; increasing taxes, levies and duties. Pretty much anything the government can tax, it does tax. As to probate and speeding fines, this is the new way to fund South Australia. It is time for a new approach, it is time for a rethink, and it is time for South Australians to have a government committed to job creation, economic opportunities and putting this state back on track.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (16:57): I could take the opportunity to say a huge number of things about the budget. There are some things specific in this bill that I do want to comment on. There are things that are not in this bill that I might take the opportunity to comment on. One of the things I want to do is get some answers from the Treasurer with regard to the Stamp Duties Act and an interpretation of the Stamp Duties Act which has been taken by the Commissioner of Stamps for many years, as I have discovered recently, which I think is absolutely contrary to the wishes of this parliament when the relevant clause was passed in 1990, and I will come to that shortly.

I am delighted that after all these years the government has decided to repeal the sections of the Water Industry Act which basically will see the ending of the Save the River Murray levy. I remember—and not a lot of people in this place can remember this far back—prior to the 2002 election, the then leader of the Labor Party decreed that there would be no new taxes if he was elected to government. As was the want of that particular gentleman, semantics played a big part of his modus operandi. A levy such as the Save the River Murray levy certainly was not a tax, and that was fair game. We have suffered for many years in this state with the Save the River Murray levy.

I am delighted that a couple of years ago, when the Water Industry Act was going through the parliament, I was the shadow minister and I was able to institute an amendment in that act, which was supported by some of our friends in the other place, which saw that those SA Water customers who were in no way connected to the River Murray were exempted from paying that levy. I successfully made the argument that, if you were not connected to the River Murray and thus your behaviour or changes in behaviour would have no impact on the River Murray, it seemed a bit rich to me that you would be subject to that Save the River Murray levy.

The government at the time argued that one of the designs of the levy was to make people think about their use of water (of course, this was as we were heading into what has become known as the millennium drought) and the problems that that was causing for the River Murray. I thought it was a poor argument at the time, and I am delighted that the government has all these years down the track realised the folly of its ways and is getting rid of it.

There are some other measures in the bill that I am happy with. I am particularly happy that we will eventually see the demise of stamp duty on certain transactions in South Australia, particularly those transactions which impact on a lot of my constituents. I talk principally of the farming community and the fishing community. Fishermen for years have been utilising temporary transfers, leases, of rock lobster pot licences to balance their take against their quota. So, some fishermen fail to catch their quota, some fishermen have had a really good season and are able to catch more than their quota, and they transfer licences to allow a balance at the end of the season so that they have a licence to take the number of fish that they have taken; and they are always riled that that balancing on their part is subject to a stamp duty fee.

Similarly, when transferring farming land one of the big costs to the farming community is stamp duty. The transfer of farming land is a fairly regular occurrence in country and rural South Australia. The value of the properties being transferred is substantial and as a consequence stamp duty impost is quite substantial.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I indicate now that on this stamp duty matter I would like to go into committee—I am not sure how the government is going to manage this—because I have some questions for the Treasurer, particularly when we get to the clause which will amend section 67 of the Stamp Duties Act. It is clause 31 of the bill before the house to amend section 67. Section 67 is the section of the act which allows for the 'computation of duty where instruments are interrelated'.

Historically, stamp duty was payable on the transfer of property—and we are talking in the first instance about real property, and again I am talking about farming land but not necessarily farming land; the same would apply for commercial property—where landholdings quite often are made up of more than one title. What apparently became a reasonably common practice was that the vendor, when selling such a series of titles, would often effect the transfer with a series of different instruments so they would have a separate contract for each of the titles. As a consequence, the rate at which the stamp duty was applied was lower, because the rate increases with the gross value of the property being transferred.

To overcome that, amendments were made—and these were to a different stamp duty act from the one that is in vogue at the moment. Amendments were made to give the Commissioner of Stamps the ability, under such circumstances where he was of the opinion that the separation of the instruments was done purely to minimise the stamp duty obligation, notwithstanding that to aggregate the separate instruments and thereby assess the stamp duty on the aggregated value—and it did have a significant impact.

I draw the house's attention to the House of Assembly Hansard, page 686, of 21 March 1990. I want to read from that a couple of paragraphs which give the history, so that the house understands what I am talking about. There was obviously a series of amendments to the Stamp Duties Act going through the parliament. This was the then member for what would now be the seat of Giles. I am not sure whether it was the seat of Giles in those days, but certainly it was held by Frank Blevins. It reads:

Thirdly, it is proposed to amend the principal Act so that sales or gifts of property or interest in property that together form or arise from substantially one transaction or one series of transactions, are charged at the rate of duty that would apply if there were only one sale or gift.

He goes on to say:

The current provision, section 66ab—

and that was in a previous act—

applies only to land or interest in land being conveyed. Section 66ab was enacted in 1975 to counteract the tax avoidance practice of dividing land into smaller portions to avoid increased rates of stamp duty on higher value transactions. The same problem has again arisen but in relation to other property, such as businesses and units in a unit trust.

I read that out to the house today because that gives the historic context that I was describing a few minutes ago, that there had become a practice established where if there was more than one title the vendor was disaggregating the property into the separate titles and transacting them as separate instruments and thereby lowering the overall amount of duty payable. The particular amendment at the time was to capture other instruments in the transaction of other property than real property.

I now draw the house's attention to page 880 of the Hansard of 27 March 1990. Obviously, we had got into the third reading debate at that stage, and Mr Stephen Baker moved to insert a new amendment. I will read the amendment that he wished to insert. It reads:

a conveyance that relates to separate parcels of property that is being conveyed by different persons to the same person (whether that person takes alone or with the same or different persons) where the commission is satisfied no arrangement or understanding exists between the persons conveying the property otherwise than to convey the property separately and independently from each other.

The opposition, on 27 March 1990, sought to clarify section 67 by putting in an amendment which very clearly stated that, if the property was being transacted from two separate persons, from two separate vendors, to the same person, it would not be captured under section 67. The Hon. Frank Blevins had indicated that the government opposed the amendment, and Mr Baker went on to say in his explanation:

We are trying to avoid the situation where a person in good faith happens to buy adjoining properties which are under separate ownership.

He went on to make this comment:

I would be astounded if the minister said to me that, in the situation of a person buying property which is vaguely related from two separate individuals, there should be an aggregation of property values for duty purposes.

He was saying to the minister, 'Is that what your intention is?' and the Hon. Frank Blevins' response to that was, amongst other things:

Where a person enters into two quite separate contracts to buy land—it may be adjoining, but under separate ownership—they are not covered by proposed new section 67. There are clearly two separate contracts bought from two separate people, and this section would not apply. It does not apply now and it will not apply in the future. It has never been and will not be a problem—

and he goes on to say—

assuming that Parliament passes this Bill substantially as it was introduced. So the answer is 'No,' the Deputy Leader need have no fears that genuine separate contracts will be touched by this Bill, because that is not the intention of the legislation.

I bring this matter to the attention of the house because a constituent of mine recently brought a matter to my attention where he bought a number of adjoining farming properties.

His conveyancer sought a ruling from the Commissioner of Stamps as to the amount of duty payable. The commissioner said, 'We will aggregate this land as per section 67, notwithstanding that the properties involved were from individual vendors.' I will repeat that: 'notwithstanding that the properties involved were from individual vendors'.

It seems that the Commissioner of Stamps today is acting completely contrary to what this parliament was told by the then minister when section 67 was enacted. When the minister of the day was asked this specific question, he gave an unambiguous answer to the house, yet the Commissioner of Stamps is now acting contrary to that advice.

I do not know how long this has been going on, but it has come to my attention that, in a document dated February 2008, a handout that is available on RevenueSA's website called Stamp Duty Document Guide, the bit pertaining to section 67 of the Stamp Duties Act clearly states that section 67 of the Stamp Duties Act can apply where two or more documents have different transferors and the same transferee—that is, different vendors selling separate parcels of land to the same purchaser. At least since 2008, that has been the interpretation of the Commissioner of Stamps, notwithstanding that when section 67 was enacted, the parliament was told that that sort of transaction where there are different vendors would not be captured under section 67.

I have gone back through the Stamp Duties Act and I have looked at the history of section 67. There have been no changes to section 67 since 1990 that would impact on the advice that the house was given at that time. In fact, I think I am right in saying that the only amendments to section 67 have been deletion of certain subclauses to the section. I can find no evidence that the parliament has changed its position with regard to the interpretation of section 67, yet the Commissioner of Stamps is clearly interpreting it quite differently compared to what the parliament was told would be the case.

I want to question the minister as to what on earth is going on, and I want my constituent to get a refund from RevenueSA to the tune of some $12,000. Since my constituent bought these three adjoining properties, he has bought a further property which is also adjoining or very nearby. To be quite honest, I am unaware of how that transaction has been treated by the Commissioner of Stamps and whether that transaction has indeed been aggregated with the other three for the purposes of stamp duty, because it is quite likely, under the interpretation of the Commissioner of Stamps, that that is the case.

The reality is that the Commissioner of Stamps has been given, under the legislation, very broad powers, powers that I would describe as summary, powers to indeed impose penalties without reference to appeal. It is an area where the parliament has obviously said, historically, people try to diddle the system and the commissioner needs these powers, and the parliament has obviously agreed with that. With the evidence that I have uncovered on this particular matter, I seriously question why the Commissioner of Stamps has been given these wide powers and so much confidence by this parliament because I think he has overstretched his authority, substantially.

When we get to the end of the second reading, I would like the house to go into committee so I can get some answers from the minister to these particular questions. I will finalise my comments there, but this matter I regard as being very serious, and I will be wanting answers to these questions from the minister.

Bill read a second time.

Committee Stage

In committee.

Clause 1.

Progress reported; committee to sit again.