WINNINGS OF PUNTERS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16838, 29 December 1928, Page 6

WINNINGS OF PUNTERS

PROPOSED INCOME TAX SUGGESTION IN AUSTRALIA SYDNEY, Dec. 13. The outcry against the State Government's taxation proposals has evoked the question whether the merits of racing as a sport are so pronounced as to entitle the log army of punters to exemption from taxes which every other industry in the country has to bear. Now that the Government is working overtime in an effort to devise new means of dredging the pockets of the public 'it has been suggested that the winnings of punters, if taxed, would probably yield anything up to £2;"iO,0(H) a year. it looks as simple as shelling peas. If a punter has, say, £5 to collect after a race, let the bookmaker give him, not the full winnings, but AM 10s, and a receipt for 10s income tax, which the bookmaker would already have paid into the Government coffers, in the form of income tax receipts purchased from the Treasury. Such a tax, it is suggest I'd, would suffer less from leakage and evasion of payment than most other forms of direct taxa lion, since the bookmaker would be merely an agent, so to speak, collecting the tax, and would have no temptation to conspire with the punters to dodge the ".slug." What is more, no one could protest that here vas another iniquitous form of compulsory taxation, since it. would be an easy matter to refrain from backing winners if one desired exemption from this impost.