Brendan Smyth is claiming victory for what is apparently the ninth “stupid” tax plan the ACT Government has had to dump.
This evening the Revenue Legislation Amendment Bill 2005 was passed (must have taken a long time) minus a proposal to impose stamp duty on cars at their listed price.
Apparently,
largely this would have meant that if someone advertised a vehicle at $30,000 but only sold it for $25,000 stamp duty would still be collected at the $30,000 list price.
This proposal was opposed not only by the Liberals but also by the car salesmen of Canberra, although presumably they would not have been much affected since it’s the car purchaser who pays the stamp duty.
Mr Smyth lists the other eight tax proposals he thought were “dumb” and concludes by posing the (poorly punctuated) question:
The worry for the Canberra community is that all of these taxes were creations of the former Treasurer Ted Quinlan, who at least had some economic credentials; what can we expect under the new Treasurer Jon Stanhope has next to no economic credentials?
What indeed?