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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-09-11 Daily Xml
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Land Tax

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY (15:02): Supplementary question: so, in effect, the answer to my fourth question is, 'No, the government will not provide a simple English explanation'?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (15:02): I just provided a simple English explanation to the honourable member, so I have answered question 4. The government may well be in a position to provide further detail as part of our consultation process in terms of how payroll tax grouping provisions work, whether or not there are any tweaks in relation to the grouping provisions for land tax aggregation provisions or related corporation provisions and payroll tax. We are very happy to try to assist people in terms of trying to understand tax law, but the premise of the question, that in some way you can summarise complex tax law so that everyone in the community can understand it, is a very difficult task to achieve.

I have sought to explain to the honourable member that it is not just the case of land tax, it is also the case with stamp duty and payroll tax. The simple explanation is—as I have just given, to anyone who is out there, a mum-and-dad investor—if ultimately you as an individual or you and your business partner control a group of companies, that is, you control the decisions, whether it be through other companies or directly, if you have a controlling interest in a particular company, and that company then has a controlling interest in another company, and that interest has another controlling interest in another company, and it is the fourth layer of company that actually owns the land, then you actually control that particular company. That is the simple explanation.

If you have effective control—and that might not be the precise legal explanation, but if you want to talk about a layperson's explanation of it—and they are related companies, then you are aggregated in all the other jurisdictions and you will be aggregated in South Australia. I do not think you can get any simpler explanation than that. The actual drafting, as the member has quoted, is much more complicated and complex because the lawyers have to draft it to cover for all circumstances.

But as I said yesterday and I say again today, if you look at the ownership structures that currently exist in South Australia, it looks like Noodle Nation in some circumstances, where, ultimately, you trace the company or entity that owns the land back through three or four various layers of other ownership entities before you find out who it is that actually controls all these particular companies. The complicated tax law has to cater for all those sets of circumstances.

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