Professor Ashton Silva, RMIT, on the impact of Jacinta Allan’s new tax:
“What it does do is increase, substantially, the rates; so if you look across residential, commercial and industrial, these all have massive increases in contrast to what people were paying last year.
“I think it has the potential to really affect those people who are struggling most, those who don’t have a lot of room to move in terms of their savings versus consumption, paying home loans, there is now a tax that they would not have necessarily budgeted for.”
Further on his last point, De Silva emphasised that this stress also extends to the rental market, and that while “rents are tight” and many are “struggling to find places to live”, there is little incentive for the landlords to absorb the increase in cost.’
