The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 10 June 2000
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HERE
NO WONDER the GST advertising campaign is costing so much. It must take a group of highly-skilled and well-paid actors to pretend to understand the new tax system, after only a brief explanation from the voice-over guy, and still come away smiling. So why isn't art imitating life here? With 20 days to go, why all the panic? Have we learned nothing for our $420million? (Or will that be $46 million if the campaign extends past July 1?) Have we all just been humming along with the song and not taking in the content? Is there any content? Well, let's do a quick check-list to see where everyone stands. Have you applied for an Australian Business Number yet? Registered for the GST? Do you need to? Is the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission going to hit you with a $1million fine if you stuff up? Should that be $1.1million? Relax, more than likely ACCC head Allan Fels will just take the opportunity to get his head on TV again and make a public scapegoat of you. More importantly, if it's true that some things will go up in price, some things will go down and some will stay the same, then why does it appear that most things are only going up? Can we have another ad to explain that one, please? If you're venturing into this tax fog alone, if you don't have an accounting degree or a battery of accountants to guide you into this new system, here's a bit of free advice: Don't bother going anywhere near the Government's official GST website for any help. What a crock of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. The brochures sitting in newsagents and falling out of newspapers are only slightly better. Instead, annoy the people manning the GST hotlines. (Those numbers again are 13 30 88 for businesses and 13 61 40 for consumers.) Bug them for every tiny detail of how this wonderful new tax system will personally affect you. Tell them you want to smile like the people on the commercials. Keep them on the line for as long as possible. Make them earn their cut of the 10 per cent. Of course, it is the small traders that are sweating most right now. I won't even bother repeating what many of the taxi drivers I have chatted to over the last few weeks think about the GST -- remove all the profanities and it will be as illegible as the Government's website. It is even worse for small retailers. Take my local general store, for instance -- a long-standing family business. Like many other retailers, they still do not know what the products in their shop will cost in three weeks' time. How can they? Not even the ACCC can tell you exactly how much tax will pertain to each product. (Although the Commission's website at www.accc.gov.au will give you a rough idea of what everyone will be paying for what.) So the family has accepted help from a company that approached them a while back, offering to take care of everything from re-programming their cash register to providing the new coloured price tags to differentiate between GST and non-GST affected products (in this case, white and yellow labels respectively). It is not just accountants that are making a fortune out of this. The daughter of the family told me there is thin booklet around called ``Helping You Understand The GST'' that finally helped clear a lot of things up for her. I begged to borrow it. And indeed, this 20-page brochure is the clearest, propaganda-free explanation of the GST I have come across, especially for anyone in the retailing trade. It wasn't supplied by the Government, and it didn't come from the ACCC. In fact, it's been given to stores around the country by the distributors of Coca-Cola products. Easy to read, straight to the point, and probably costing well below $420 million to produce. Maybe this is what the Prime Minister means when he says the GST will all make sense once it actually starts up. Then it is no longer his problem -- and, undoubtedly, someone will step forward to help clean up the mess. What choice have we got?
