Bentley-driving dental surgeon at eye of Lib tax reform storm

A dental surgeon with a passion for luxury cars has been thrust into the war between Liberals and their traditional supporters.

A salesman, left, hands Timothy Goh — the face of a campaign against tax reform — the keys to his Bentley. Picture: Facebook.

A dental surgeon with a passion for luxury cars has been thrust into the war between the South Australian Liberal government and its traditional conservative supporters over land tax reforms.

Despite attempts by Premier Steven Marshall this week to sell his compromise land tax package, which slashes the top rate but keeps a controversial blitz on the use of trusts to minimise tax bills, relations between the government and investors have hit a low, with the Property Council comparing Mr Marshall to former Labor leader Bill Shorten.

The blow-up came after it emerged one of the people enlisted for the campaign against the land tax changes — described repeatedly by Business SA and the Property Council as an attack on “mum and dad investors” — is a dental surgeon who owns a Bentley worth almost $300,000 and a private dental practice in the ­exclusive Adelaide suburb of Unley. Liberal sources believe Timothy Goh’s affluence shatters the “mum and dad” investor line and bolsters their argument that the only people negatively affected by the changes are a minority of well-off South Australians who use trusts to minimise their land tax exposure.

They also say Dr Goh invited scrutiny on himself by using his Facebook page to mount personal attacks on Mr Marshall.

Dr Goh wrote on Facebook last month that the Premier was “unfit for his role” when he downplayed the state’s unemployment figures and has accused the Premier of “screwing over” investors with the land tax reforms.

On the same Facebook page, Dr Goh appears in photographs driving some of the world’s most expensive cars and drinking $150 bottles of Penfolds RWT, known as the “Baby Grange”.

The photographs also include the moment he took ownership in 2017 of a Bentley Continental GT, valued at almost $300,000, with a salesman from the car dealership Chateau Moteur handing the keys to a beaming Dr Goh.

A Liberal source said Dr Goh was “hardly the ideal choice to front a campaign that’s apparently about people doing it tough”. “You can’t knock a person for getting ahead but driving around town in a Bentley doesn’t really sit with the whole ‘mum and dad’ investor line,” one MP said.

A furious Dr Goh on Wednesday accused the Liberals of smearing him and knocking him for having gotten ahead through hard work. “I have never hidden the fact that I have got a good ­income but I have worked very hard, I have three degrees, I have worked over 80 hours a week for the last 20 years,” he said. “The fact that the Liberals, a party for which I have held fundraisers and made donations to in the past, would do this to me is abhorrent. They’re trawling through my ­social media.”

He said he had taken a high-profile role on Facebook in ­attacking the government’s changes because had been urged to do so by friends and associates who were going to be “smashed”. These included an elderly Greek-Australian with a small portfolio of properties and a fellow medic whose land tax bill would increase by $307,000 a year.

In the Business SA material denouncing the original land tax changes, Dr Goh appears as a case study saying he will be so badly ­affected that he will move his business interests interstate.

In a sign of how savage the ­debate is becoming, SA Property Council chief executive Daniel Gannon — who until recently was an adviser to Mr Marshall — took aim at his former boss. “We’re now seeing class-warfare language from Premier Steven Marshall, reminiscent of Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen,” he said.

Mr Marshall this week announced a compromise on land tax which slashes the maximum rate but maintains the controversial aggregation policy, which prevents a minority of property owners from dividing the value of their property through trusts to minimise their land tax bills. Mr Marshall won support from his partyroom for a modified package that cuts the top rate of land tax payable from 3.7 per cent to 2.4 per cent and removes the charge for 9000 taxpayers.