Now I am not a complete idiot, I do accept the taxation system and acknowledge that tax is a way of life and through paying taxes we have a good health system, good roads, good police, good firemen, public servants to administer this geat nation etc etc. I pay quite a bit of tax in way of income tax, stamp duties, GST, excise etc etc which I never complain about for the reason outlined above...........BUT
........I recenty received a bill in the mail from the State Revenue Office (there is a statement in itself) stating that I have to pay A$500.00 odd for land tax. Ok, so what is land tax, this beast has never raised it's ugly head before. I saw the toll free number on the bill and rang the information office of the State Revenue department where I asked my question......
It turns out that because I have two properties and my "principal place of residence" (that is a quote) is in only one of them so I have to pay tax on the other one. Why......."because it is in the act" is the answer.....ok, so it is in the act, but what does this tax contribute towards, because I already pay rates on the property......."that is a local issue, this is in the State act" is the answer.....that doesn't answer my question....."it is in the act so it is payable" is the answer......ok, that's going no-where, what if i was to say that I am in a relationship and my partner and one of my children live in one property and I and another of my children live in the other property, thus making both properties a principal place of residence......."I must warn you that providing fraudulent information can result in a fine or imprisonment" is the answer......thank's for that, but you haven't answered my question....."I don't know the answer to that, other than you have told me that you reside at one of the residences and therefore the land tax is payable under the act" is the answer".......my final comment is that this is wrong and I do not agree with it and I plan to fight this crazy tax and I don't think I should have to pay this......"it is in the act" is the answer.....fuck the act.
Now, it just so happens that we moved from our lovely location (those who know us know this story) to be closer to our chosen school, expand our business and be closer to future opportunities for our children. We bought a house in town as we really liked it and could afford it (our bank manager told us this). We decided to put caution to the wind and more than double our mortgage to buy this place and then immediately put our property on the market. Regular readers of this blog would know that we have had real estate agent issues and the threat of bloody great pulp mill being build near the house as well as interest rates going up and up and up...people were simply not buying houses in that area. Fine, if our crystal ball was working we probably would have held off moving and tried to seel our first property before buying the one we are in now (aka - our principal place of residence). As punishment for our devil may care, go forth bravely into uncharters waters, brazen leap of wanton abandonment we have been paying an extremely large double mortgage to our bank for ten months, paying double rates, paying double insurance, maintaining two properties and working our collective arses off to exisit in these trying times.....now for the State government to tax us just because we have two properties and only live in one is absolutely crazy - it feels as though the government has penalized us for taking a risk to better our future. If the bloody government hadn't stretched it's bum cheeks for the reeming of the proponents of the pulp mill and spent our taxes on flogging a dead horse for so long then maybe my house would have been sold earlier and this wouldn't be an issue.
I just this this tax is wrong.
