@mineeo21 wrote:
So, what do you (anyone) think happens to anything bought before July 1st?
1) Is that purchase still GST free due to being paid for before the deadline even if not received yet due to coming from abroad? Or...
2) Is it subject to GST regardless of when bought if it is delivered after July 1st.
I think Australian Businesses need to bring down overpricing of goods because they are a hell of a lot more in comparison to the USA or other countries.
And...income tax is another one that is done in overkill, In Japan, no matter what is earned, an employee only pays 6% plus a local area tax which is also very low.
Australian Government - you need to stop with the double taxing and overtaxing.
I'm just quoting above the points I wanted to respond to.
I'm assuming that the purchase date is what determines whether or not GST will be applicable on an import, since it is collected at point of sale and sellers are not obliged to collect it on purchases made prior to July 1st (i.e. if the projected or estimated delivery date had to be taken into account, the transition would be even harder than it will be post-July 1st).
Re: the pricing of goods in Australia. It's not as simple as looking at the price of an item in one country and comparing the price of the same item in Australia. You have to look at the economy of each country in its entirety, plus things like the overheads a busines has, the cost of import or manufacture, the cost of distribution and so on, respectively.
To put that in perspective, I'll use a grand scale example, with just one factor. The minimum wage in Australia is $17.70, but can be as low as US$7.25 in America, that's about $9.24 AUD - imagine a company like Walmart paying a few thousand employees minimum wage, and a company like Target paying the same number of employees minimum wage in Australia; that difference alone would mean (if both companies pay minimum wage) Target Aus is forking out an extra $40K per hour on a modest estimate of 5000 employes, that would be a $1.6 million difference in just a 40 hour working week, which then needs to be made up in the revenue - and that's just one cost of business that is more in Australia than it is in the US.
The same logic applies to taxes in other countries. BTW, Japan has a consumption tax like GST, and the rates are based on the salary just like they are here - starting from 5% (on the equivalent salary of around AUD$23k), up to 45%, so it is not a flat 6% and AFAIK there's no tax free threshold like there is in Australia, but there are exemptions, so if someone was earning under the equivalent of AUD$23K, they wouldn't pay tax on the whole amount).
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