Private Member's Statement
Mr ANOULACK CHANTHIVONG (Macquarie Fields) (18:57): Given it is budget week, the humble working-class economist returns to give his analysis.
First, I can say I am very fortunate and privileged to be the Member for Macquarie Fields since 2015.
My local honest, hardworking community go about their days doing the right thing: working hard, paying their taxes, looking after their family and friends, volunteering to build a better community and, of course, during the pandemic provided much of the essential workforce to keep our economy going and health system operating.
All they wanted was their hard-earned taxes to be spent objectively, fairly and where they were most needed.
True to form, my local community has missed out again in this budget, like every other budget since 2015, on the much-needed funding to upgrade the Macquarie Fields train station lifts.
This Liberal Government has been in power now since 2011, yet each and every single year the Macquarie Fields community continues to miss out despite station patronage statistics justifying its upgrade.
Of course, we all remember the skulduggery and blatant pork-barrelling of a few years ago that resulted in Hawkesbury River station getting its lifts despite having only a fraction of patronage compared with Macquarie Fields.
Not only that, the local Member and now Treasurer took much pleasure, at the Macquarie Fields community's expense, at having pulled the strings to allow the pork-barrel to occur.
Not only did my community miss out on their lifts at Macquarie Fields, but also they got their noses rubbed in it in the process.
Theirs and other people's hard-earned tax dollars are being spent like a Liberal Party political piggy bank where you only get resources if your local MP is a Liberal, not based on your need.
Public maladministration through the blatant misuse and misallocation of public funds proves that this nearly 12-year-old Liberal Government is just a bunch of snollygosters who are in it for themselves.
My community should not have to beg to get their fair share, especially when their needs are justified by evidence and statistics.
As a humble working-class economist, I can say from qualifications and professional experience that it is a complex discipline. Trying to estimate an outcome based on an array of factors, some of which are unquantifiable and others totally unknown, is no easy feat. Predictability, or rather unpredictability, is the more common outcome.
Take, for example, some of the brightest economists working at the central banks around the world—indeed, even at our own Reserve Bank of Australia [RBA]—who predicted that inflationary pressures would be transitory. Month and after month, that was their analysis and conclusion.
Further, interest rates were not meant to rise until 2023‑24. As we now know, that is not the case.
Inflation is running hot here and around the world. I recall the RBA governor estimates that it will be 7 per cent by the end of the year. We also saw economists predicting that house prices during COVID would probably reduce by about 10 per cent to 20 per cent. But, as we now know, in some areas of New South Wales house prices went up by 50 per cent.
My point is that economic modelling is hard and, despite the best and noble efforts of some our brightest economists, we do not always get it right. In actual fact, it is more like how much we get it wrong.
That is where I have great concern about the much-touted "reform" of the land tax on the family home. Last year when the original model was announced, I called it for what it was: the then Treasurer and now Premier's "snake oil" tax that was marketed as the housing affordability panacea.
But now we have a much more modified version of that original land tax. We have gone from the larger boa constrictor land tax to the slightly smaller anaconda version. It is still a snake of a land tax on the family home, whichever version or colour you want to apply.
The whole premise of the snake oil land tax, in whatever form, is predicated on the illusory savings of stamp duty suddenly disappearing because we choose a new tax.
Just think about that central assumption for a minute. The price of that precious family home reduces by the stamp duty just because this Liberal Government says so. Abracadabra! The house price shall reduce by this amount because the Liberals say so, and we get an added bonus of paying this yearly tax for each and every year we are in our house.
The Liberals do not control house prices. This land tax does not automatically reduce house prices by the corresponding stamp duty.
In essence, we are now paying two taxes on our family home. The illusory savings will just bid up house prices.
Under the Liberals family home tax policy, we are better off because we pay two taxes now instead of one: one directly in land tax and another indirectly through the embedded stamp duty price remaining on your home.
I have more to say about this, but essentially this land tax is the Mike Tyson tax policy with a right hook and an uppercut, and we will not actually feel the pain.
I will speak more on this when time permits, at least to say people are going to be worse off under this bad policy.
