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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-09-08 Daily Xml
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Land Tax

Ms WORTLEY (Torrens) (14:19): My question is to the Treasurer. Can the Treasurer update the house on the status of the 2019 land tax reforms and the delays in issuing bills?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer) (14:20): I thank the member for Torrens for raising this important issue today because I know that many of her constituents, like many others, were impacted by these reforms and the difficulty in getting accurate bills out to property owners.

To place it in context, sir, you may recall that in 2019 the previous Liberal government indicated that they would be making changes to the land tax regime here in South Australia. The effect of those changes, it became apparent over some weeks, was that some property owners would collectively suffer an increase in land tax liabilities of more than $100 million a year, and that was due to changes to aggregation arrangements and also changes to land tax applicable to land held in trust arrangements.

This was an extraordinary revelation at the time and led to the then government not only committing to follow through with those reforms but also proposing a series of other reforms in order to offset the impact of higher taxation on South Australian property owners; that is to say that, while several thousand South Australian property owners would collectively be paying an extra $100 million in land tax, there were very generous tax cuts provided to property owners, including those located overseas and interstate, who owned more than $2 million and $1 million of land.

These were complex changes that led to RevenueSA having a devil of a time trying to get accurate bills out to affected property owners; in fact, in May of last year, the former Treasurer had to come to the parliament and seek a legislative change in order to give property owners, and in turn RevenueSA, more time to make declarations about their landholdings in order to get accurate bills out.

You might recall that a couple of months ago I gave an update to the house about how many bills were still to be issued for the first land tax year that these changes took effect, the 2020-21 financial year. Even at that time—I think it was in May of this year I gave my last update to the house—since the state election, there were over 6,000 bills still to issue. I am pleased to advise that, in recent weeks, RevenueSA has caught up significantly on getting some of those overdue bills out. I am advised that, as at 30 August this year, there are 347 land tax bills that still remain outstanding for the 2020-21 financial year and 726 bills that remain outstanding for the 2021-22 year.

It is an extraordinary situation that RevenueSA had been pushed into. It was a badly thought-out, quite frankly vote-losing policy that continued to generate bad publicity for the previous Marshall government right up to the election. It was poorly sold to the public, and to this day a significant number of our supporter base is still very angry with us—hang on a minute, those are not my words: they are the words of Christopher Moriarty and John Rowley, as reported in the Liberal Party's election review—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN: —just showing how incompetent and damaging the former regime was to the South Australian Liberal Party.

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