General Practitioner Payroll Tax

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:18): My question is to the Treasurer. Has the Treasurer received advice or modelling regarding any additional revenue the new treatment of payroll tax on contractor GPs will generate for the state and, if so, how much is it?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer) (14:18): My understanding is that I haven't. This is not an issue about identifying cohorts of businesses to generate additional revenue. This has been an issue which has been raised as a result of a court case in another jurisdiction. One of the jurisdictions, New South Wales, along with South Australia and a range of other states, since 2008, for more than 15 years now, has had harmonised payroll tax arrangements. The court case made it clear with regard to the particular business that was the subject of that court case about how the contractor provisions applied in payroll tax in New South Wales and, hence, subsequently across other harmonised jurisdictions.

This is not a process we are going through in an effort to try to identify businesses to pay additional payroll tax to generate additional revenues for the state. It's simply about making sure that we have a payroll tax regime which is being applied equitably across all taxpayers.

As I made clear to the house in my previous answers on this issue late last year, it is impossible for a government to maintain a regime where some businesses, even within the same profession, are paying payroll tax and are legally obliged to pay payroll tax, and other businesses which are similarly legally obliged to pay payroll tax are not paying payroll tax. That's the issue we are grappling with. We have worked very hard here in South Australia to make it as easy and as reasonable as possible for those businesses that have discovered their sometimes longstanding payroll tax liabilities to come into compliance with the law and to give them a long period of time to do that, without applying retrospective taxation obligations to them.

I am particularly grateful for the approach from the royal college that represents general practitioners here in South Australia, and also the AMA. This is not an issue that anyone is enjoying dealing with, but we are dealing with it as reasonably and as fairly as possible to make sure that we are maintaining the equitable treatment of all businesses that are obliged to pay their payroll tax obligations.