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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-12-01 Daily Xml
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State Budget

The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD (15:23): My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer outline the initial reaction from relevant stakeholders to the budget that was recently handed down?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (15:23): Time doesn't permit me to go across the ambit, so I will try to be as short as possible. The government I don't think has been congratulated by so many stakeholders for any budget that I have ever been associated with or ever observed, and I think that's probably a natural corollary of the fact that we are spending more money than any government, past or present, has ever done in terms of new projects and programs.

I won't go through the broad range of new projects and programs that were outlined in the budget speech, but it is fair to say that a whole variety of stakeholders right across the board, not just business organisations but a number of non-government organisations and the like, have been very excited by a range of new projects and programs in very many spending portfolios right across the board.

I do want to highlight just a couple of sectors. I think the construction sector—it is self-evident and I won't go into detail, but HomeBuilder has been enormously important. But what is going to be important is the housing stimulus that follows HomeBuilder. Given the announcements on the weekend, it may well be that that stimulus is not required until late next year or even early 2022.

There is an inevitable bring-forward in terms of residential housing with these sorts of HomeBuilder schemes, and the government's program support will be important for the sector post the peak of the HomeBuilder scheme. The construction industry generally will be very significantly advantaged by the $16.7 billion record public sector infrastructure program but, again, as we go past the peak it is going to be important to seek to manage it.

What I did want to address in terms of the response are the ongoing challenges for the tourism, hospitality and travel sector in particular. There are a number of hardworking national and South Australian businesses, in the travel sector in particular, that have really been struggling. I was delighted that after a number of weeks the commonwealth government has announced, as recently as today, a very significant travel sector support package, which I think provides individual grants of up to $100,000 for travel agencies and smaller grants to as low as $1,500 subject to certain eligibility criteria.

Some in the travel sector are struggling and we are assisting with our land tax support arrangements, which I have spoken about before, and our small business grants schemes, supporting in a smaller way some small businesses. I think people within this particular sector will become aware, but need to be made aware, that the very significant payroll tax initiatives the government has introduced in this budget will be of significant benefit to a number of people within this particular sector, and also the tourism and hospitality sectors. That is, the abolition of payroll tax for any small business under $4 million for 15 months from April through to June of next year will be a significant incentive or assistance to people who have been massively impacted in this particular sector.

Even more significantly, for some of the bigger travel agencies and hospitality businesses that are over $4 million in payroll that remain COVID-impacted, this budget introduces a six-month waiver of payroll tax for those businesses from January through to June next year. In one or two cases, rough back of the envelope calculations that Treasury has done for me indicates that some of our bigger businesses might benefit to the tune of up to a couple of hundred thousand dollars in terms of payroll tax reductions.

People need to be aware—and whilst it is, at the moment, a pessimistic outlook for those within the travel sector, tourism and hospitality, I think that is a very tangible sign of state government funded assistance, together with the federal government assistance which has been announced today.

Finally, I think the increasingly optimistic signs of the arrival of vaccines internationally and in Australia—certainly much sooner than I ever even contemplated—means that we are ever-hopeful that the arrival of those vaccines in a broad way in the national and international economy will hopefully assist some of these struggling businesses that rely very much on much more open borders in terms of travel.

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