The number of Canberra homeowners objecting to their land tax bills has soared to almost 200 this year, up from just 13 a decade ago, amid rising tax bills and a territory government crackdown on tax compliance.
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Answers to questions on notice recently posed by Opposition leader Alistair Coe show the number of objections to land tax assessments has risen from 13 in 2007-08 to 193 as of late March this year.
While the vast majority of objections are "disallowed", about 10 per cent each year are settled by the ACT Revenue Office, avoiding a potential appeal to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
The rising number of objections has come as the ACT government, under Chief Minister Andrew Barr, has increased the government's total land tax revenue by 95 per cent since 2012-13, up from $66.5 million that year to $130 million this year.
While it has risen steadily since 2007-08, the number of objections to land tax assessments jumped from 67 in 2012-13 to 109 in 2013-14 and has kept rising to 192 to date this fiscal year.
On the government's current forecasts, land tax revenue will also rise to be worth $154 million to territory coffers in 2019-20 - a 131 per cent increase compared with 2012-13, when the government first announced its long-term tax reform agenda.
That agenda has centred on abolishing stamp duty over 20 years, scrapping insurance tax and cutting payroll tax for businesses.
While the Gallagher government "agreed in principle" with a 2012 taxation review recommendation to abolish residential land tax "over time", that government acted only to abolish the tax on commercial properties, balanced with a concurrent rise to commercial rates.
In almost every budget since 2014, the Barr government has instead increased its residential land tax revenue - which is currently charged only on rental properties -but will be expanded in July to some 2500 vacant rental properties in Canberra and 189 foreign investor-owned properties, raking in a further $10 million a year.
Asked whether the rises in objections to land tax assessments were related to rising bills, Mr Barr's spokesman said "no", instead saying it was likely due to "increased compliance activity" and that the number of objections was "driven by the number of compliance assessments".
While the government put $5.7 million to fund a new team to crack down on tax evasion in the 2016-17 budget, Mr Barr's spokesman did not respond to questions regarding increasing compliance activity before then that could explain the rising number of objections.
But Mr Barr's spokesman rejected any suggestion the government had agreed to abolish land tax on residential land, citing the 2012 response that the government noted the review panel's "observation that land tax in its current form is unfair, as it discriminates on the basis of tenure".
That response, while agreeing "in principle" to abolishing residential land tax, also noted it was "an important source of revenue" and that "any transfer of residential land tax to general rates will be subject to community consultation".
Documents released under Freedom of Information laws show in 2015-16, before that team began operating, the revenue office completed 1016 land tax compliance assessments, netting $8.4 million in extra revenue.
In 2016-17, the new team completed only 547 such assessments, netting territory coffers only $5.6 million in land tax compliance revenue, still more than the new target for such revenue in 2016-17, which government set at $4.7 million.
Mr Coe said the Chief Minister was "cashing in record revenue through exponential increases to rates and land taxes, in addition to stamp duty" revenue, which has also risen on the back of rising property prices, despite the abolition plans.
“There is a groundswell of Canberrans who are absolutely fed up with the constant gouging of this government," Mr Coe said.
“The number of people lodging formal objections against the Chief Minister’s destructive land tax regime has gone through the roof."
Mr Barr's spokesman also said that the government had "no immediate plans to abolish land tax on residential investment properties".
He also said while the government could not provide greater detail on the specifics of individual objection cases by deadline, there was a correlation between completing more compliance assessments and rising objection numbers.
