Answers to Questions

Land Tax

1464 The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee) (25 September 2019). How many land tax payers are forecast to be liable for land tax in the 2020-21 financial year, with taxable land holdings between:

1. $450,000 to $755,000?

2. $755,001 to $1,098,000?

3. $1,098,001 and above?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier): I have been advised:

The distribution of revenue and number of land tax payers across the land tax brackets from 2020-21 to 2022-23 will be based on the land tax scales that apply in those years.

The land tax scales to apply will depend on whether the legislative amendments for the government's proposed land tax reform package are passed in parliament and whether there are any changes to the current proposal as detailed in the Land Tax (Miscellaneous) Amendment Bill 2019 (the Bill). I understand proposed amendments to the bill introduced into the Legislative Council have been tabled by the Hon. Mark Parnell.

If the bill is passed, the impact on land held in trust and distribution of those impacts will also depend on whether trustees potentially liable for the higher surcharge rates of land tax pay the surcharge, or lodge a notification of beneficial interests for land tax purposes. Where a beneficiary or beneficiaries are nominated the trustee will be liable for the standard rates of land tax on the trust held land. The nominated beneficiaries will be treated as the owner for land tax purposes and their interest in the trust held land will be aggregated with any other interests in land that they hold as an individual.

The actual land tax scales, and therefore amount of tax, to apply from 2020-21 and future years will also be impacted by the annual indexation of land tax thresholds in line with average site value growth as determined by the Valuer-General.

To provide an independent view on the modelling of the impact of the reforms proposed by the government, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was engaged to review the methodology used by the Department of Treasury and Finance. PwC reviewed and supported as reasonable Treasury's methodology for constructing the estimate. PwC did not identify any alternative ways to use the existing data sets to improve the reasonableness of the estimates. The government has made the findings of this review publicly available.