Tuesday, 1 August 2023

Schools payroll tax

Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:18): I do agree with Mrs Broad and Ms Lovell and some other contributors regarding the fact that the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games has demonstrated a very special kind of incompetence. Ultimately, it will cost Victorian taxpayers well over a billion dollars and has made us a laughing-stock on the world stage.

But in these things Ms Allan actually has some competition. I opened up the Age newspaper this morning to read an article by the new education editor Robyn Grace demonstrating yet another backflip from the Labor Party on its so-called schools tax. This is just the last of a long list of backflips. Initially the hit list of schools to now pay payroll tax was going to be approximately 110, then it was 60. Initially the threshold was going to be indexed, then it was not. The threshold was first $7500, then it was $15,000. Well, I read another backflip this morning on the front page of the Age newspaper that the schools on the hit list would be set until 2029, but then actually in question time, during Ms Tierney’s interesting ministers statement about the animal census, I was opening up the Age application and I read that the minister had come out today to unsurprisingly once again back down – a backflip on a backflip. This is so shambolic now that even those opposite must admit that this tax simply has to go. It will only cost schools – and parents, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis – thousands and thousands of additional dollars. If those opposite will not do it, when we get into government, we will scrap it.