TREASURER Scott Morrison claims the latest $5 increase in the Passenger Movement Charge (departure tax ) is needed to cover the revenue lost by scaling back the planned backpacker tax.
“The backpacker industry is $5 billion a year or thereabouts for the tourism industry,” he said. “I mean these backpackers are spending this money on the tourism industry in regions all across the country. So they (the tourism industry) are the principal beneficiaries of these measures (to reduce the planned backpacker tax).”
Fortunately there is at least one Coalition MP willing to speak out against increasing the departure tax.
“This tax is a pernicious impost on our aviation and tourism sectors which are already under pressure,” he thundered.
“Tax increases are designed to discourage consumption and so placing a tax on travel is designed to discourage, I assume therefore, business activity in the travel sector.”
The name of this outspoken MP? Well, Scott Morrison actually. He was addressing Federal Parliament from the Opposition benches in 2008 on the fiscal obtuseness of the Rudd Government. And they wonder why the electorate is so disillusioned.
Once again, the travel and tourism industry has been conned by a version of the pea and thimble trick.
Right now there is no backpacker tax and Australia attracts to its shores hundreds of thousands of working holidaymakers who perform a double service to the country – they undertake rural jobs for which farmers and growers cannot find local workers and they spend money ($5 billion did you say, Scott?) that helps to keep regional economies ticking over.
Enter politicians with a harebrained scheme to kill the goose that laid the golden egg with a 32.5% backpacker tax. In the resultant uproar it emerges that the prospect of such a tax will see a dramatic drying-up of visiting backpacker numbers.
An election generates a flood of weasel words conveying the impression of a retreat from the backpacker tax if the Government is returned.
But we still get a backpacker tax (albeit a lower rate should do much less harm to incoming numbers) plus a few sweeteners. And then the Government slaps on a 9% departure tax hike to cover a revenue shortfall that was never there in the first place.
As Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond put it: “They are now expecting us to pay for them making a decision that was bad in the first place.”
