Land Tax

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee) (14:29): My question again is to the Premier. How many landowners facing land tax aggregation measures have no other investments to provide for their retirements?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:29): I don't have all the details broken down, but what I have provided to the house before is that there are over 22,000 people who are already aggregated. These 22,000 people will end up significantly better off because of two significant reforms that we are putting in place. One is to increase the threshold at which land tax is paid from the current $391,000 up to $450,000, a massive leap in that threshold at which land tax is payable; 9,000 people who are currently paying land tax will not be paying land tax into the future.

The second and major reform is to take us from having the top marginal land tax rate in the country, at 3.7 per cent—massively uncompetitive, driving investment out of South Australia or repelling investment coming into South Australia. It will take that away and take us down to 2.4 per cent. This is lower than Queensland and this is lower than Western Australia. It's the average of the mainland states in Australia.

It's a massive reform. Would we like to go forward? Of course, because we on this side of house stand for lower taxes, taking that burden from the people of South Australia, getting our economy moving in the right direction, creating more jobs. That's what we are about. It's what we have been about in our first 18 months. I am very proud of the team that I lead. Reform is tough. Others choose to kick the can down the road, sweep the difficult situations under the carpet. We don't do that, we don't crumble, we don't fall apart.

We listen to the people of South Australia. We make decisions on behalf of all South Australians, and that is precisely why we were elected in March last year. Every single day that we are in this place we will be making decisions in the best interests of the people of South Australia, and that means from time to time people will have different opinions, but it doesn't mean that we crumble. It doesn't mean that we say, 'Too hard. Put that in the too-hard basket.' No way. We have been elected to drive economic reform, economic growth, jobs creation in South Australia, and that is what we will do.