I know I'm late, but some words on this. 1) GST isn't the issue, the way you collect it is.
GST is 10%. The Customs processing fee is $230ish. No one is going to import a book if the processing fee remains. No other tax requires you to pay for the levying of the tax. It's just this odd situation with Customs. Customs say that the fee reflects their costs. I'm sure that is true. All that really says is that Customs is the wrong mechanism to collect the tax is you want to tax low value imports. Of course Australia's rent-seeking retailers would love a $230 per-import tariff on the competition. 2) The Internet has changed things, and you can't go back Retailers imagine that levying a GST will go some way to ameliorating the drop in demand they have experienced. That's not going to happen: a) the GFC has altered the spending/saving ratio, and retailers are on the front line of that. b) If you stop the imports you haven't stopped the price and product information. The information about the retailers' costs of business still come through. This lack of information was a huge source of windfall profit for retailers. In the 1980s we had crap products sold at outrageous prices. Retailers can't go back there. c) A per-import charge is just asking for someone to use the Internet and some warehouse space to intermediate and spread the charge across a daily import. And if that is successful enough then Amazon and Wiggle and so on will simply shaft them and set up their own warehouse here. 3) There are lots of uncollectable goods and services taxes Not all economic activity can be taxed. There is significant economic activity within a household. Yet there is no "goods sharing tax". This is despite the government's forgone revenue if those people were all individual householders. It's blatant discrimination against people who live by themselves and something ought to be done about it :-) It's possible that international imports will just have to fall into this basket. It really depends on the inventiveness of Treasury. There's a lot to be said for moving the point of taxation to the use of the credit/debit/EFT card. Of course, you'd then have the banks crying blue murder. Personally, my question is "where are Australian retailers on the Internet?" Seriously not one major Internet retailer is Australian, in any category. That is a huge failure. Especially considering that the government moved early to ensure that laws were friendly for electronic sales. I'd say the reason is that Australian retailers lived in world of high protection from competition; where by controlling access to shop sites and by purchasing competitors they shut out threats to their business. The Internet happens to be the competition they didn't recognise and was too far away to buy out. Now they are trying to shut it out. They are still not at the stage of effectively engaging with trying to sell over the medium, and by the time they do they'll find that more efficient retailers with ten years of experience are there first. In all seriousness this lack of world-class Internet retailing is a tragedy for the future prosperity of our country. We won't have a high-volume conduit to the rest of the world which will prefer to sell Australian-produced goods. If you've got to sell through a US website, you may as well be based in the USA. -glen _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
