What will actually happen to parcels posted after 1st July that don't have GST collected on them?
Will they be stopped at the border? (seems like an expensive exercise to me)
Will gifts be required to pay GST too?
What's to stop someone getting a friend in another country to purchase and ship for them to avoid the hassle?
I don't mind paying GST on things I can't get here; my issue is restricting people from having choice because of its implementation.
I still can't figure out why all the big internet stores are blocking Australia because of a tax collection. I'm fairly certain that in the USA if you live in a State that has an Amazon warehouse, you have to pay local sales tax.
Also, my wife sells things on Etsy, and they are also thinking of blocking Australia, but when she sells things to people in England, on the invoice it has listed a VAT collected amount paid for by they buyer.
I'm just confused as to what the Australian Government is doing differently to everywhere else that already mandates collection of taxes and duties and such, that has pissed off the retailers so much that they are refusing to deal with Australian customers.
One of my friend in the US has a package of stuff to send me for things not available here. Some things from Amazon that wouldn't send outside of the US, and Grotusque which we couldn't get here at all.
All I see is this as an exercise for Gerry to limit his competition instead of trying to fight it. Easier to just block his competitors. And even then, makes me want to not buy from his stores even more
The controversy around Australia's implementation of the low value GST is that they have adopted a vendor collection model, which imposes the collection of GST on onlne retailers, third party marketplaces and freight forwarders (ie redeliverers). They will be the first country in the world to use this approach, other countries collect the GST or VAT through customs (like Australia will continue to collect GST for goods over $1,000 in value). Australia is rightly or wrongly imposing the cost of administering this to vendors because they know it will be extremely costly to have customs collect it.
You are quite right that Amazon collects different sales taxes in the US depending on the state of the buyer. For all you people crying poor about paying this GST, the US is a very interesting case study. Up until last year, Amazon avoided paying the state sales tax where it didn't have a physical presence (ie distribution centre) whereas local stores like Best Buy were required to collect the tax. US retailers therefore cried poor for many years because they were at a competitive disadvantage. Amazon resisted it but was eventually forced to comply. It's one of the main reasons Amazon has grown so quickly and seen numerous store based retailers go bust. I'm pretty sure that is not a good thing.
The funny thing about this Gerry hate is that he stands to benefit far less from this than what you may expect. Most of what Harvey Norman sells (ie TVs, matresses, fridges, washing machines etc) is not subject to foreign competition anyway.
We have a GST, it's part of our tax system, if tax revenue decreases because too much spending shifts to overseas where GST isn't collected then that revenue still needs to come from somewhere.
The implementation may be bad, Gerry may be an idiot, but it's pretty flimsy to reject the principle of what's happening.