GST on imported goods

[tetibird]

Probably this has been covered lots before, but searching threads got confused with old & new info. So some questions:

1. If I buy from the USA am I charged GST on the item OR the item plus postage price? 

2. The GST calculated on the item I'm looking at (via a number of sellers) doesnt appear to be 10% of either of the above & varies from seller to seller. Why?

3. Who & when is the GST paid? I'm guessing businesses do? But what about private sellers?

Is there anything else I need to know about this? I used to buy a lot of collectable & antique jewellery from the US, always under the $1000 mark & only had to worry about those who used Pitney Bowes & friends hiking up the mail cost.

Thanks

[4channel]

---

@davewil1964 wrote:

Yay, the whole cheersquad has turned up, spouting the same wishful 'it's not fair' rhetoric.

It's certainly fairer than having people import items, sending money off-shore to benefit other economies and contributing absolutely nothing to Australia's economy.

I might have said this before, but not as many times as you've posted trying to validate your ONE point.

---

Ahh, my old friend the guy that is bound to land on anything which is anti GSP or GSP or *sigh*
Actually, GST doersn't actually benefit the economy as such.

---

@4channel wrote:

Annie in Florida decides to sell her cassette and 45 rpm record collection that she had as a teenager during the 1980s. Nolan Sisters, Donna Summer,  Bruce Springsteen etc..  She's a mum now and has no room to  Carolyn in Footsctray, Victoria decides to snap up a few and then gets hit with a nasty surprise. Anyway, most folk know about one of the nasties.

  So lets just look at the GST issue here. Here we have 2 buyers just normal everyday folk, one seling unwanted items and another buying them. The transaction is between them. It would be no different than if it were a local transaction where Carolyn drove from Footscray to Essondon and knoked on her door with $30, except for the fact that she wouldn't have to pay GST.

---

So with regard to the above. Should Carolyn an ordinary non-business person be charged GST for for buying records and cassettes from an ordinary everyday non-business person so it could benefit the economy?

BTW: The second hand items that people are buying from overseas are in the majority of cases not available here. Otherewise they would be buying local.

[davewil1964]

Actually, GST doersn't actually benefit the economy as such.

It does if it is money that wouldn't otherwise be forthcoming.

Btw: a guy is something you use to keep a tent stable.

[countessalmirena]

 ... or ...

                             

[davewil1964]

But that's a (at the time) Christian name.

[countessalmirena]

True. It's an interesting eponym... "Penny for the guy!" It's along the same lines as:

• Robert Peel's name inspiring the British term "bobby" (and also "peeler") for a policeman,
• Thomas Bowdler's prudishly shortened Shakespeare versions inspiring "bowdlerism" / "to bowdlerise",
• Franz Mesmer's use of "animal magnetism" inspiring the term "mesmerism" / "to mesmerise",
• Charles Cunningham Boycott (land agent for an absentee Irish landowner) who evicted struggling tenants which led to the Irish National Land League encouraging his workers and community to ostracise him, refuse to work, and for local shops to deny him service, thus inspiring the term "boycott", and
• the Greek Goddess of Love, Beauty, etc. (Aphrodite) inspiring the term "aphrodisiac" for any food or substance that stimulates sexual desire.

Quite a mishmash - a wonderful mishmash.

On the subject of "guy" with its current meaning of a rope to fix a structure such as a tent to the ground, did you know that in the mid-1300s it was used to denote a leader or guide? (Guide has the same derivation.) I love our rich language; so much history is accumulated within words and their changes over time.

[davewil1964]

You forgot William Spooner.

[countessalmirena]

The bowl list of eponyms is a wit of a tighty mask.