October 2026 Updates

0:03

So this is Tax Talks, Australia’s tax news podcast for accountants and tax practitioners, the podcast designed to help you grow your practice.

All right, well, welcome to Tax Talks. We’re in November, here to talk about the October 2026 updates. I’m your host, Rajan Verma.

I’m Andrew Henshaw.

And today we’re very delighted to have Aaron Fitchett, managing partner at Baumgarteners.

Well, thanks, guys. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this since you raised it with me. It’s a new experience for me, so I’m very excited to go through the process and add what I can.

Yeah. Aaron, you were telling us just before that you’ve just clocked over 30 years of practice.

Yes, I know that’s very hard to believe looking at me, but I started young. I actually did. I went into the profession in an accounting firm straight out of high school and then did my degrees, postgraduate study, and CA and CPA in parallel with working.

So I did it the wrong way. Don’t do that, guys. For anyone on the camera, don’t do it that way. So, 30 years last month.

Yeah. And one thing you were saying is that the current environment, the things you’re working on at the moment, is, to put it one way, a challenging period.

Yeah, I think I said words to the effect of I’ve never seen a period quite like this before, where there’s been so much sustained, relentless reform, if you call it that, or change.

I know all accountants and lawyers have been affected by it to some extent through the AML changes. We’ve also had additional big reform around payday super that we’ve had to help our clients with.

We’ve obviously had the CGT and negative gearing changes, which are generating a lot of work. There’s also a lot at the state level around vacant residential land tax. Of course, clients turn to us for help on how to navigate those rules.

There are land tax changes, and now, of course, all of this minimum trust tax, which, as I reflect on all of the change, is the big one. This is the one that’s going to drive a lot of future work and a lot of future restructuring.

Yeah, absolutely.

2:22

Well, perhaps that’s a good segue into the first item on our agenda. I must admit, I was saying to Andrew before, I’m kind of getting a bit over it now.

Ever since we took over Tax Talks, I feel like it’s just been budget changes every month, and every month there’s something new that happens.

And they’re not even in effect yet and you’re already cooked.

We might get to a month, maybe in six months’ time, where we actually don’t have any legislation or updates.

Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that day. I was really excited about all this initially, and now I’m like, another month.

So, we’ve got legislation now. That’s the big news, I guess, for October. We now have a number of bills introduced. In mid-October, three different bills were introduced.

In essence, these are the bills dealing with what is called tranche two of the CGT changes. Tranche one already went through a number of months ago.

These rules also contain the 30% minimum trust tax changes and a number of other changes, like R&D changes and the innovative business CGT concessions. So there’s a fair bit there to unpack.

We’ve talked about a lot of those in recent episodes, so we don’t propose to go through all of those things in detail.

Where we’re at now is that those passed the lower house, and then they were referred by the Senate to a committee for a report, which is due around mid-November. So there’s still a bit to play out.

It might be worth highlighting a couple of things that we’ve seen change from the previous exposure drafts.

In respect of the trust taxation changes, the points I had on my list were around this fixed trust definition, which we talked about previously. Essentially, there are two different ways to get into this.

And yes, it’s confirmed that that will apply across the income tax law, which I think is at least one positive, in that we potentially won’t have to rely on that PCG.

4:40

To deem there to be a fixed trust. But it doesn’t apply for certain purposes anyway, like the 45-day holding period rule.

That’s a good point.

There was another change where it was proposed that the minimum trust tax status only had to be tested at the end of the year. It looks like what’s in the legislation now is that you have to be a fixed trust for the entire year.

Otherwise, you could just change it at the end.

That’s right, yes.

And change back.

Change back. Not that we would ever contemplate that.

Yeah.

There were also some changes around some of the wording of the EET regime. I think that might have been driven by some of the chatter and criticism about what this actually does.

I think some of the language used was pretty sloppy around fettering the trustee’s discretion.

I don’t think anyone’s going to resolve those questions, but they have tightened up some of that wording.

One interesting point was that there was some uncertainty about, if you did the nomination and nominated a corporate, could you have that corporate owned by another discretionary trust?

The explanatory memorandum seems to make it clear that that is okay, even though that trust itself has complete discretion over where it goes.

The shares themselves are, for want of a better term, fixed. So I think that’s an interesting point.

And I think that’s the opposite to a change they made to the CGT rollover, where in the exposure draft legislation it wasn’t clear whether you could roll from a trust into a corporate owned by a discretionary trust, but now they’ve made it very clear in the bill.

Yes. You can’t do that.

Unfortunately.

For one purpose it’s okay. For the other one it’s not.

Yeah, it’s really bizarre. I must admit I was a bit surprised when I saw this because, throughout the legislation, they said it mustn’t have any material discretionary elements.

Then, of course, the bill sets out what that means. The really disappointing aspect is that, when you get to what are material discretionary elements, it just refers to the Minister—

7:03

—making provisions around what that will specifically include.

But I would have thought that a company with shares owned by a discretionary trust would fail that. Yet it’s clear that it’s okay, at least for that purpose.

Then, of course, you’ve got that trap that you mentioned, Aaron, that it doesn’t work for the rollover.

Yeah. Not that we’ve been able to workshop this very much because we’ve only just got the bill, but it seems likely that, in a practical sense, the two pathways they’ve given us to get out of the minimum trust tax, which are the EET or the CGT rollover, both have very rigid limitations that are probably going to make them practically not that useful.

Practitioners are going to be turning their minds to restructuring, but not using these. They’re going to use existing pathways, and that’s where really most of the action is going to be, I expect.

That’s a good insight. I was going to ask you, Aaron, what sort of discussions or questions are you getting from clients or internally about the trust taxation stuff more generally?

Yeah, I would say this measure has generated probably the most inquiries from our clients, and certainly discussion internally, because everybody has a discretionary trust in their group.

If you need the services of an accounting firm, you’re likely going to have a discretionary trust.

More so than the CGT changes?

Well, they were simpler. Most people were able to muddle through those themselves, and they didn’t really need to bounce off us too much.

They’ve asked about valuations. We got asked more about it before the law came in, at which point we couldn’t really tell them anything because we didn’t know what it would finally look like.

But once it came in and it was reasonably clear, those queries, for us at the minute, seem to have dried up, except around valuations.

We’re getting a lot of questions around: how does that work? What would be acceptable to the ATO? Et cetera.

But this one is generating a lot of discussion and a lot of workshopping ideas around how we might get the best of both worlds.

The big trade-off with it, of course, is that you can do whatever you’re going to do in a corporate, and that’s fine, but you lose the benefit of indexation.

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To get to a corporate, you’ve got these two new avenues, being the EET, if you leave everything in your trust and then just distribute to a corporate, or do your rollover, the rollover being quite limited.

Then you’ve got your other rollovers. But the point is that, at this stage, we just can’t advise our clients. We’re saying there’s no clear pathway.

I’ve had suggestions of hybrid trusts, where we have fixed entitlements to income and capital which differ. The income units might go to a corporate and the capital units might go to mum and dad, for example, things of that nature.

But until we have, I think, a final Act and then the accompanying LCRs, it’s almost impossible to pick a path.

You’re absolutely right.

Yeah. I’ve heard people suggesting having companies with multiple classes of shares, for example, to try to replicate those sorts of discretionary arrangements.

I have my concerns about that. But you’re right, until the legislation is finalised, we can’t be sure what the right pathway is.

Yeah. So I’ve said upwards of 20 times now: we just can’t advise. This is roughly what we think it’s going to look like.

But, as we saw from the exposure draft legislation to the bill, there were huge changes.

The way they seem to be approaching this reform is they bring the framework legislation, pass that, and then tweak it with tranche two and subsequent Acts.

So even once the law’s in, can you be sure that’s where we’re going to end up when these things go live? It’s very difficult.

One other point on the EET, and one bit of news on the EET election, is the state taxes point.

Part of the discussion and criticism was that basically the states said, well, we don’t know whether that triggers duty or not, and we’re not going to give you, or might not give you, relief.

A bunch of different legal practitioners were giving different views on whether or not there’s duty and the risks of it and so forth.

Fettering the trustee’s discretion.

Yeah. Are you fixing the trust and creating a dutiable event, and all of that?

What we’ve got now is New South Wales has come out and said, basically, if you re-elect the government—

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—they will amend it to make it clear that the choice to become an EET is not a taxable event. WA has done something similar to that.

But that’s for the EET elections, not for the rollover, is it?

No, not for the rollover.

I saw some murmurings a couple of days ago that I think Victoria, New South Wales and maybe Queensland, I might be wrong on that, were starting to talk about duty relief for the actual rollover and shifting dutiable assets.

I heard that too in Victoria.

Yeah, specifically in Victoria. It’d be interesting to see if that plays out.

Well, I imagine there’s a bit of pressure on those governments at the moment from the federal level to accommodate.

Yeah.

We’ll have to wait and see there.

One would imagine, though, when it comes in, it will only be for this CGT rollover. I can’t imagine them extending that to other existing rollovers, which is what you might want to do from a tax or structuring point of view.

But potentially, you might not get your duty relief if it involves dutiable property.

That’s it. Because one of the issues with this rollover, and I know we’re kind of getting into the rollover now, is that you’ve got to move all the assets.

Yeah. All of them.

So what happens if you had a situation where, say, you’ve got property and a business in a trust and you decide, you know what, I’ll leave the property behind and just move the business across?

You could do that under maybe the restructure rollover. But this new rollover, you can’t, because you’ve got to move everything across.

That’s a great example, one of many, about why this rollover is not that great, I think.

It might work for some people, but not for everyone.

Yeah, agreed.

Other changes are, as I mentioned, that the bills also introduced the innovative business 50% CGT concession.

There are some minor changes from what was proposed previously. Generally, those rules are looking at a three-year holding period requirement.

An exception has been put in if there’s a takeover or similar arrangement. It sounds like it’s mirroring what’s done in the ESS space, where there are those restrictions as well.

There are some changes around—

14:06

—interests held through widely held unit trusts and AMITs.

There’s also a provision around a company being able to give a notice that it’s going to cease issuing IBC assets.

We talked about this last time. It seems like a lot of detail and a lot of work to get this status, and ongoing regulation to maintain it. So I guess we’ll see what happens there.

Aaron, have you fielded any questions from clients or anything around that?

Not on this one. This one will be, I think, more relevant once it’s started and people are looking to set things up and do things. Then we’ll consider it.

But look, clients aren’t even really that across, in my experience, the ESIC rules, and they’ve been in for a long time now.

Yeah. I think it’s almost 10 years, or basically 10 years.

Yeah. So look, it’s one of these things where I think it’s a great little nice-to-have, but it’s not going to be the main thing.

Clients don’t come to me asking about things like this. They see the headlines and ask, what does this mean for me?

Yeah.

The other one here, which I thought I’d mention, is just the R&D. That’s one of the ones we haven’t talked about that much previously.

There’s a raft of changes around expenditure caps, intensity thresholds and limiting it to core activities.

Rajan, it’s not really a space that we do a great deal of, but I understand that the R&D changes are pretty significant as well, so that shouldn’t be overlooked.

We have a number of clients in the R&D space. We’ve certainly got a few that are going to be affected by the 10-year limit.

Yes.

Just because of the nature of the industry they’re in, it takes a very long time to go to market with their product. Even once you go to market, you’re often still running R&D alongside.

You can be in a situation where you’re still getting R&D refunds because the spend still exceeds your otherwise taxable income.

That’s a hard limit?

A hard 10-year limit.

Yeah, for refundable. I think after 10 years they’re proposing it converts to non-refundable.

So for any clients, and we certainly have some, that—

16:32

—were using that as a mechanism of funding, they’re just going to have to find alternative sources. Very unfortunate.

Do you think any of those clients might consider going overseas?

Well, the one I’ve got in mind is doing exactly that.

They’ve gone to the US and appointed a corporate adviser over there to see if they can potentially get a sale in the next year or two.

Now, that’s obviously an overall assessment of everything, not just one measure. But this doesn’t help in terms of their reliance on it for funding.

It’s a great product they’ve built, but it’s probably fair to say this may have hastened their thinking. It wouldn’t have changed it overall.

Fair enough.

Well, we might get into some of the cases this month. There were a number of interesting cases in October which we’ll run through.

Yeah. Interesting, I think, is the word for some of these.

Perhaps no more interesting than this case called Sudna, S-U-D-N-A, and the Commissioner of Taxation, which is a Full Federal Court tax case.

I might run through the facts for this one. It’s a very unusual dispute, but I’ll run through the facts and then we’ll talk about some of the details.

So, we have a taxpayer. They bought a property many years ago. They entered a contract on 28 June 2019 to sell that property for roughly $5.5 million.

They then get a deposit of $2.5 million in the next income year, so the 2020 income year.

Then settlement happens a little while later, again in another income year. Settlement is in August 2022, so in the 2023 income year.

What the taxpayer did initially is, firstly, in the 2019 year they didn’t put in any gain.

In the 2020 year, they included a roughly $500,000 capital gain. Then in the 2023 year they put in a larger gain, and there was a credit for withholding as well.

But, as it bore out in the case, none of those things actually—

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—were correct.

So the taxpayer was audited, and that’s when the investigation started in earnest.

But I might just ask Aaron, how common is it with clients, the contract date versus the settlement date, and that conversation about when you’re actually reporting a CGT event?

Yeah, I would say very common.

Most clients, I think, are quite aware of that now because, once you get to a certain level of sophistication and you’ve done it enough, you know it’s contract date.

But it is the first thing we mention when we sit down to have a meeting with a client, a tax planning meeting, or just a talk about a specific transaction.

The first thing we say is, you know it’s contract date.

Often it’s a little bit of a surprise, but not usually these days.

Of course, that can be modified in certain situations, particularly around earn-outs and things like that. But that’s when it gets interesting.

The basic situation, I don’t think, is that complicated.

Yeah. He just fluffed it. He completely cooked the whole thing.

What I don’t understand is that this case very much feels like CGT fundamentals to me, and for some reason it ended up in the Full Federal Court.

We take it for granted that a CGT event happens on the contract date, but clearly this taxpayer did their lodgements and declarations in line with when they received money.

Right.

Which I can understand as a layperson. You’d think, well, I shouldn’t be paying tax until I receive the cash.

I got a deposit in this year, I put some money in a return for that, and I got the settlement down here. It’s almost like he’s treated it as a self-elected earn-out.

Yes.

Which I can understand why a layperson might do that.

But still, I’m surprised that it got all the way to the Full Federal Court and no one explained to him along the way that, no, it’s contract.

I mean, this is the thing with instalments. When you sign a contract which has a long settlement period and you might be receiving money in instalments, you always have to warn the client that the entire tax bill is due up front.

If it’s a short period, that’s not a big deal. But if it’s a long period and the upfront amount you’re receiving is not—

21:18

—much, then it could be a somewhat unfunded tax liability for a long period of time before you receive the money.

It can be quite problematic, actually.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. Completely agree.

So, the fundamentals. You’re right, Rajan, yes, it’s contract date.

If this contract was signed on 28 June, then that’s the income year it’s supposed to go into. That obviously wasn’t what happened here.

Where it gets a little bit quirky is that, essentially, by the time it was reviewed, the Commissioner was out of time, subject to certain rules, to amend 2020, but seemingly wasn’t out of time to amend 2019, potentially.

Essentially, the argument the taxpayer was running was: well, you can’t put a gain in both years.

You can’t go and assess me in 2019 if I’ve already got an assessment for 2020, and you’re prohibited from amending 2020 because more than four years have passed.

Although there is an exception where you have to give effect to the completion of a transaction or a CGT event, there actually wasn’t any CGT event for 2020.

So what are you amending? You’re basically just fixing up an error at that point.

There were also some constitutional law arguments, which the court dismissed pretty quickly.

He wasn’t self-represented, was he?

No.

Okay.

No, that was... no.

It just sort of has that vibe to it.

Yeah.

I think the interesting thing about this one is that, as you’ve alluded to, Andrew, when it comes to the section dealing with amending prior returns, you’ve got your general four-year period of review, but there are exclusions to that.

One of them is fraud and evasion, which is the well-known one. But the other one is if it’s to give effect to a CGT event or to recognise a CGT event.

The reason that happens is because, under CGT event A1, the A1 event doesn’t actually trigger until settlement occurs and there’s a change of ownership.

But the deemed timing rule takes it back to the contract date.

So if you had a particularly long contract, you would need—

23:42

—that extended amendment period to be able to go back and bring that capital gain in.

The ATO has an old tax ruling or determination that says that, if you have to go back and amend, there’s not going to be interest or any penalties for that, obviously because you’re giving effect to the gain.

You don’t actually have to go back and do that until settlement happens. So it’s a confluence of a few quirky things.

Yeah.

Well, the ATO actually cross-appealed the original decision as well. I think they were seeking guidance or clarification on just how wide that rule is.

Interestingly enough, what the Full Federal Court actually said in the end is that the ATO couldn’t amend 2020 because there was just no CGT event in that year.

But that wouldn’t stop them from assessing 2019 anyway.

Yes.

What the taxpayer could do to help themselves is lodge an objection for 2020.

Even though that was out of time, the Commissioner has a discretion to allow that.

It would be acknowledged by the ATO that not granting that, in a situation where they’ve already assessed 2019 and tax has already been paid on that, would be pretty harsh.

Yeah. So, a real curious one.

Yeah, it is very—

25:58

—it is very curious.

Again, even the fact that this was in the Full Federal Court, because this is what you do.

If you’re trying to seek an amendment of a return that’s more than four years old, it’s out of time and it doesn’t fit within any other exclusion, like giving effect to a CGT event, then what you can do is request an amendment by making an objection.

It’ll be out of time, but the Commissioner has a power to consider an objection out of time.

If the objection is upheld, then the Commissioner has a power to give effect to that objection without being bound by the usual timing restrictions.

So that’s basically the pathway, which is what the court had to explain. But we all kind of know that as a matter of practice.

Yeah.

So the taxpayer was trying to appeal to, I guess, what you would say is natural justice.

You’ve assessed me in 2020, so you can’t then also assess me in 2019.

The court said, of course you can. It’s a separate financial year. It stands on its own.

But there is a pathway for you to get your 2020 tax back.

Even though my understanding, just reading this, was that the Commissioner gave that to him anyway, and the court said, no, you can’t. He’s got to object.

So in fact, he wasn’t out of pocket. The Commissioner did move it to the correct year and amended 2020.

He was trying to use the fact that he didn’t think the Commissioner could amend 2020 to get out of an adjustment to 2019.

Yeah. So it was a somewhat clever argument.

I think we’d all agree that the reasonable thing to do is just return the full gain in the 2019 year and pay the tax.

Yeah. But they were trying to come up with clever arguments to get out.

Indeed.

I think there may have been another aspect to this because you’d wonder: look, you’ve paid it in 2020.

We all kind of agree, yes, it should have been declared in 2019. I think even the taxpayer accepted that.

But the amounts declared couldn’t be reconciled with the price they were talking about. So I suspect the gains were significantly underdeclared.

I think there may have also been losses. I don’t know if those losses would have been available in 2019.

You could imagine a situation where you generated a loss in 2020 and could use it then, but couldn’t use it in 2019.

I’m not sure if that was what happened here, but I think he had some losses, and it came to my mind that maybe that’s part of it.

Because you’re right, otherwise, what does it actually matter which year it is at the end of the day?

Yeah. Well, he split the gain over 2020 and then 2023 as well. So I imagine they took it out of that.

Maybe if you added 2020 and 2023 together, you got back to the correct overall capital gain. It doesn’t say.

Yeah.

But you can certainly run into that situation that you just mentioned, Rajan, under the earn-out rules.

If you have a qualifying earn-out, as you know, when you receive subsequent consideration, you’ve got to go back and amend the tax return for the year of the event.

There is a statutory exception for interest in that case, which is complementary to the ruling on the standard rules.

But—

28:19

—if you have a subsequent loss, too bad.

Yeah. If you have a loss between the original CGT event year and when you actually get the consideration, there’s no way to use it.

Yeah.

Let’s move to AusNet. Do you want to run through AusNet?

Yeah, AusNet was an interesting one. I’m not sure how much application it has to SMEs, but it’s perhaps more relevant to the bigger end of town.

This was a GST case.

We all know the electricity company. There’s a retail arm to AusNet, but there’s also the distributor arm.

Essentially, what happened here was the retail arm was the one that customers dealt with. They sent the invoices, collected the fees and whatnot.

But the distributor is the one that actually provides the electricity and does things like connections and all that sort of stuff.

So they do the work. The retailer is really an intermediary that deals with the billing and collection of money. It’s the hub that customers deal with.

What I understand happened in this case was that there was obviously GST charged on various services and other things.

When AusNet doesn’t meet certain service standards, it’s required to return money or make compensation payments to customers.

That’s what happened here. I think there were around $16 million of compensation payments made, and AusNet was seeking to use that as a decreasing adjustment to the GST that was previously declared.

Basically saying, well, it’s a reduction of consideration. Customers paid this amount, I had to pay this back to them, and we should pay GST on the difference, not on the gross.

That’s right.

There were references to different divisions in the GST Act to try to get that outcome. But ultimately they weren’t able to offset it.

The payment of the $16 million to customers was not seen as part of the same supply as the provision of the—

30:37

—services. It was seen as something different and therefore couldn’t be used to reduce the original consideration.

I think your more standard situation is that you supply services to someone, maybe you pay GST on an accruals basis, and then you provide a discount.

Division 19 gives you that ability to say, right, it’s a decreasing adjustment at that point because you give a refund.

Give a refund, yeah. Ordinary commercial dealing.

I think the thing here is that, because this was essentially a statutory regime, if you’re the customer, you’re just paying for the electricity or the connection or whatever.

You’re not thinking in your head, yeah, but if my power goes out on Tuesday, then I’m going to get $50 back, and that’s kind of for the power supply.

Essentially, they’re saying there are two completely different things. They’re not related to each other.

For that reason, it’s not like a discount or refund to a customer.

It feels like a correct decision to me. You’ve got a regulatory regime that says you must compensate the customer for certain events.

It’s not framed or referred to as a refund. It’s not a refund of anything provided. It’s compensation for their muck-around time and so on.

It feels disconnected on the facts.

I tend to agree. It’s unfortunate, though, because economically, essentially, you’re getting less.

But I do take the point that it is different. You can’t say it’s a return of something that was supplied. It’s more like something new.

It’s a separate obligation that they’ve got.

I was thinking of another one. This obviously doesn’t really come up in private businesses very much, but I was thinking while on the train that the train operators have those service guarantee levels as well.

I’ve never even applied for them, but if they don’t hit their reliability metrics, there are customers who are eligible for some sort of compensation.

I wonder whether it would apply in that situation as well because it’s somewhat similar.

Again, it’s not a reduction off your myki travel fee, but a compensation amount. Maybe it’ll be different.

33:00

Maybe a way you could get around this would be if you just discounted future invoices and said, well, I’m not going to pay you compensation, but I will compensate you a different way by reducing future supplies.

Maybe that’s a way you could...

I think it’s difficult with this because it’s a regulatory regime that specifically says these things need to be done.

It does feel like something that would be pretty easy to navigate around contractually with a client or customer.

You’d write your agreement in such a way that it is a reduction in what they’ve paid, or a refund, so it’s all for the same thing.

Yeah, exactly.

But again, it’s a fundamental. It’s interesting because it’s a refresher on GST: who’s making a supply to whom, and these sorts of things you have to do whenever you’re thinking about a GST one.

I’ll move on and talk about Carberry, which again is an interesting case.

It’s called Carberry and Fire Rescue Victoria, a Full Federal Court case.

You might firstly note that the Commissioner of Taxation is not mentioned as either of those parties, but it is a tax case.

It’s rare in a tax case, isn’t it?

Yeah. It is a tax case.

What this essentially concerned was a dispute about whether FBT applied and, if so, how much FBT should apply.

We might chat about some of the interesting backstory in the case in a little while.

But if we’re thinking about FBT, we’re thinking about whether or not, if an employer is providing a benefit to an employee, that might be subject to FBT.

One of the common ways to reduce that FBT liability is by applying the otherwise deductible rule.

So, essentially, if that employee incurred that expenditure themselves, would it be deductible or not?

What we had here was a system set up whereby Fire Rescue Victoria reimbursed firefighters for certain contributions to a union-run scheme.

That scheme was in relation to income protection, but also another—

35:19

—number of other things as well.

So they put payments in, and if you can’t work, then there’s income protection. But also, if some other bad things happen, you might get some compensation for those things too.

The numbers-wise, it seemed like the lion’s share of the money did come back to income protection, but there was still a significant amount for those other things.

This dispute boiled down to what the FBT position was in a situation where it’s well accepted that, if an employee pays income protection policy premiums, they are deductible.

But that doesn’t extend to some of these other things because it’s not protecting your assessable income. It’s more a capital benefit or those sorts of things.

Where it got to in the end was that the courts were grappling with whether they needed to apportion this, and if so, how to apportion it.

We’ve got a single sum that’s gone across. How do we work out, of that amount per week, how much would have been deductible?

The argument that Carberry, which was sort of a proxy for the union, was running was that this was just the incidental benefit and it was mainly income protection, so you’ve got to look at it through that lens.

Fire Rescue Victoria was saying, no, you can’t do that. You’ve got to break it up.

They gave a detailed methodology which essentially looked at how much was actually paid out under those different benefits, and that’s how they derived a formula.

Ultimately, the courts accepted that.

They said, look, it’s not a perfect formula, but, referring to Ronpibon, an old High Court case, if it’s a fair and reasonable apportionment, that’s okay.

They accepted that in this case.

Yeah. So in this case they worked out an apportionment of around 74%, I believe, for income protection.

Yep.

37:48

Interestingly, just how this case actually got to the courts in the first place, because it wasn’t your normal taxpayer gets assessed with something and then you lodge an objection and so forth, as the normal pathway goes.

This was much different.

This was the employee, or a selected employee, essentially wanting declaratory relief, which doesn’t really happen very much.

They were saying, look, even though I don’t pay FBT, it does affect me because FBT goes on all those other things, like my child support calculation and all those other reportable fringe benefits matters.

So there’s a bit of a proxy war on whether or not this dispute could actually be brought.

But ultimately, it seemed that it was a dispute between Fire Rescue Victoria on one side saying, hey, okay, we’ve got to make these payments for firefighters, but we’ve got FBT on them, and the union on the other side saying, no, you don’t have FBT on this thing.

Yeah. They picked a guinea pig.

Yeah, to run it for them.

Look, what’s interesting about this one is I wonder how prevalent these sorts of arrangements really are.

I know, for example, in other industries like building and construction, rather than have what I think is described as a union-associated discretionary trust scheme to provide these benefits, there’d be an approved worker entitlement fund set up.

Then, under the enterprise agreement, the employer would have an obligation to pay in on behalf of the member.

There’s a specific FBT exemption for those contributions, section 58PA, I think, or PB.

They would often provide very similar benefits, plus death benefits and so on, but there’s a total exemption.

So that might be the difference then.

I wonder if these aren’t that common, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard of one structured quite like this before.

Well, it seems it was based on an enterprise bargaining agreement. Essentially, this was an arrangement that was ultimately arrived at to do this, for whatever reason.

40:10

Well, they’re very common, but normally the trust would go to the Commissioner and get endorsed as an approved worker entitlement fund under the FBT Act.

That does give you certain limitations on what you can pay for.

Maybe that was their problem. They wanted to pay for things outside what the FBT Act allowed, so they went down this route instead, but have ended up with this FBT liability.

Maybe they could change it going forward.

I made an error before. It wasn’t 74%; it was 71.6% that they said was otherwise deductible.

I think there was another comment in this case about the otherwise deductible rule.

It has to be from the employee’s perspective, about whether they can get a deduction.

I think there might have been an argument here that Fire Rescue could deduct it, but that’s not really the test.

I mean, the employer can generally deduct a whole bunch of things that an employee can’t.

Especially if they have to pay it pursuant to an EBA. They’ve got no choice if they want to employ that person.

Exactly. So it would have been clearly deductible to Fire Rescue, but had the employee incurred it, not for them.

Yeah. Interesting.

All right. I think that then takes us to our next case, which is Trainer, a Division 7A case.

This one was a little bit of a mess.

What I understand of this case is that there were essentially pooled funds in a company.

The money had been lent to various places. Some of it was to non-corporates, which enlivens Division 7A.

I think what they were trying to argue was that it wasn’t the entire amount of the loan that was subject to Division 7A, it was only a part of it.

But, as we know, the burden of proof sits on the taxpayer.

Unfortunately, due to some issues with their record keeping, they weren’t able to actually demonstrate how much of that pooled fund constituted loan amounts that had been made to non-corporates versus other corporates.

Therefore, the whole thing was treated as a deemed dividend.

Yeah, it’s a bit hazy on the facts. But what we essentially know is that we had an individual who carried on a business, they had some trusts with some properties, and they had a company which carried on the business.

Money moved left, right and centre.

42:28

There were borrowing facilities, things were intermingled, and it didn’t sound like the financial accounts were in a good way at all.

But what the financial statements for the company said is that it recorded big loans to these other parties.

The arguments later on, I think, were a bit of shifting sands around what they actually were.

But ultimately, the financials showed these loans and the taxpayer couldn’t meet their onus of explaining why those accounts were incorrect, doing new ones, getting a forensic accountant, or otherwise.

It’s not the Commissioner’s job to do that. It’s not the tribunal’s job to do that either.

Ultimately, the tribunal said, look, the financials literally say this. I’m not satisfied that any of the exemptions apply.

There was no written loan agreement, et cetera. It’s going to stick.

There were a couple of comments that this was a self-represented taxpayer and that they had a lot of opportunities to perhaps bring evidence that would have helped them, but ultimately it wasn’t done.

I think it goes back to your onus of proof point.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?

My experience with reviews and audits with the ATO is that, generally, they’ll take the loan account balances as they find them in the accounts.

That is their first and primary source of evidence because somebody, usually the accountant, has applied their mind to what this amount should be.

Should it be a dividend? Should it be a loan? Should it be something else?

They’ve thought it through and categorised it.

Unless you’ve—

44:40

—got really good evidence that there was some sort of error, you’re not going to have a lot of luck overturning that as a starting proposition.

It sounds like that’s what probably happened here.

How could you get better evidence than the accounts that you’ve signed off, especially if the loans are in balance between two entities?

If they’re not in balance, it raises a lot of different questions.

Yeah.

It just seems like this guy was let down by sloppy record keeping, to be honest.

I think so. I think that’s right.

I’ve seen this in the context also of things like payroll tax reviews, and just tax generally.

The financial statements themselves carry quite a lot of evidentiary value.

I think the Corporations Act and other provisions elsewhere basically give quite a lot of evidentiary weight to those sorts of documents.

You’re not helping yourself if they’re not in good order. They can really do a lot of damage if they’re not kept properly.

So the ultimate damage to the client was an unfranked dividend of those amounts reported in the financials.

They did try to seek the section 109RB discretion.

Essentially, the tribunal said, no, we’re not satisfied that this was a mistake. We really don’t have enough evidence of that.

And 25% penalties, again, because we’re not satisfied that it wasn’t a failure to take reasonable care, essentially for the same sorts of reasons.

But I think if you were in this situation and getting reviewed by the ATO, as you said, Aaron, they’re going to take those financials on face value unless you’ve got a really good explanation.

I think so. It’s an uphill battle if you want to prove them wrong.

I’ll tell you the other context where the accounts really are so important: insolvency or bankruptcy proceedings.

Those people will take them as they find them. If they report a loan, that loan exists as a starting proposition as far as they’re concerned.

Trying to overturn that is also very difficult.

That would be an asset that an insolvency practitioner or a trustee in bankruptcy would try to call up.

Yeah, exactly.

I’ve been involved in proceedings like that previously and had to deal with a client we inherited where the accounts were clearly wrong.

We prepared corrected accounts based on source documents, and then I ended up in the Federal Court having to explain the differences between the accounts because their trustee in bankruptcy wanted to recover a loan that didn’t exist.

It was a pension payment out of a super fund, not a loan at all.

Gosh. Federal Court—

47:02

—giving evidence is probably not your idea of a good time, or anyone’s idea of a good time.

It was very interesting to go through the process, but I’m happy just to do it once and then never do it again.

Fair enough.

So, we move on to the Hughes case.

Yeah. So Hughes is a state revenue case, and it’s a case on the vacant residential land tax.

We finally got one. It was only a matter of time, but it finally happened.

This one’s quite interesting because I’ve wondered about this sort of situation myself a few times.

The taxpayers, Mr and Mrs Hughes, had their principal place of residence in Carlton. They owned an apartment that was also in Carlton.

Carlton North and Carlton. Totally, totally different.

Yeah, completely different suburbs.

If anyone’s not from Melbourne and doesn’t know where those places are, you’ve got the north there to know they’re not far from each other.

Well, the apartment had a view of the city.

It did.

So I don’t know, maybe people in Carlton and Carlton North can say, no, no, we’re not the same, we’re different.

But in any event, they tried to argue that this apartment in Carlton North was a holiday home for the purpose of the VRLT and therefore exempt from that tax.

They weren’t successful.

There were two interesting questions that came out of this.

One was that, to get the holiday home exemption, you have to demonstrate four weeks of usage by certain eligible people.

So it’s usually the owner and/or relatives, basically.

I think they had some issues demonstrating that the property was actually occupied by the right people for the requisite period of time, so they fell over on that.

There was a second, more interesting question, in my mind, about whether a property that was two kilometres away could qualify as a holiday home.

Most of the time when you deal with holiday homes, it’s, okay, you live in the inner suburbs and you’ve got a property down on the beach, the peninsula or whatever, an hour, two or maybe three hours away.

That’s clearly a holiday home. No one questions it.

Or you might go the other way around, where you live regionally but have a city pad that you like to come into for special events and whatnot.

So that’s all fine.

But when you’ve got two that are in such close proximity, I think there were some arguments about it having a different vibe and the views being nice from the apartment.

It felt like a holiday. It felt like a holiday every time we were there.

But I don’t think that question was ultimately determined in the case.

No, I think you would have a challenge.

49:18

Just to make it clear, this is a Victorian state tax. It doesn’t apply in any other jurisdiction in Australia.

But I think you’re going to have an issue trying to get this holiday home exemption if you’ve really got two places that are within the same kind of character, particularly if there are two places within metropolitan Melbourne.

I would say good luck trying to get it, just on that geographical issue.

Not to say it’s impossible, but I think it’d be very difficult.

The other point is that the State Revenue Office could just put you to your proof and say, all right, you’ve got to prove that someone who qualifies used it for 28 days.

If you just provide utilities records, all that proves is that water or electricity was used. It doesn’t prove by whom.

Or that there was actually anyone even there. You could have automated systems and so forth.

So they could, if they wanted to, just put you to the proof.

The best practice is really the logbook method, almost. Is that what you tell clients to do?

I generally recommend that they keep a diary and note in there when they’re using it.

I’ve never actually audited it for a client. I don’t know if they’re doing that perfectly, but they normally can come up with how many days they used it for.

I have a small weekender myself, and my system is that I just use my Outlook calendar.

Any time I use it, I just book it. I can go back over the last 12 months and see exactly how long I was there for.

But it’s a funny question. I know that you have to consider distance—

51:43

—under the law. That’s not just a general point. It’s a legislative factor that you have to consider.

It feels to me like, if you go to your holiday home and you’ve forgotten something, like your phone charger, and you can duck back home to get it, that maybe is some sort of litmus test as to whether it’s a holiday home or not.

Whereas if you’re so far away that you go, no, I’ll go down to the shop and buy another one, that’s what you would do on holiday.

The phone charger test.

I think the other evidentiary problem you have here is that I see this in SRO reviews for things like principal place of residence and whatnot.

If you’re trying to demonstrate that you were there, one way you can do that is by looking at your travel records and where you’ve spent money on your credit card, for example, bank transfers.

You could say, yeah, I was down at the local shops. Here’s my credit card history that shows I made purchases from the local supermarket or local petrol station.

The problem here, between Carlton and Carlton North, is how are you going to be able to prove, no, I was in the Carlton North apartment, when it’s so close to your principal place of residence that we can’t tell from your expenditure whether you were in one or the other?

Yeah. Unless you go to a cafe by it or something, but you’re probably going to the same shops, aren’t you?

You’d be going to the same places.

Yeah. Same supermarket, same cafes.

It’s interesting about the VRLT, and it’s coming up for Victorians watching, that it’s not set and forget.

The notification is set and forget.

When this got expanded a couple of years ago to all of Victoria, it used to be just metropolitan Melbourne.

There was a big project that our firm undertook to go through all of our clients and talk to them about it, and figure out who needed to make notifications.

Because even if you were able to apply for the holiday home exemption and you were eligible, you still had to notify that it was vacant and then claim the exemption.

So we went through this big project.

I’m sure it’s now drifted out of a lot of people’s minds. In fact, every year you have to reassess whether you still meet either the six months or the four weeks.

You don’t have to re-notify if you’ve met it, but you do have to think about it.

I think you’ve got—

54:00

—until 15 January to notify.

15 February now.

February, is it? They’ve changed it.

Yeah, it’s a lot more reasonable.

That is a bit more reasonable. The 15 January was terrible. No one was here.

We’ll go through that again at our firm because it is an annual requirement.

We just need to keep reminding our clients that they’ve got to apply their mind to it every year.

It could slip away fast and then, if you’re three or four years down the track, it’s 1%, 2%, 3%. It could really...

Is it of the capital improved value?

It’s capital improved as well. So it’s not just the land value, it’s the building.

But really, what advisers need to be doing is talking to clients probably at the halfway point in the year and going, just a reminder, or at least by the end of September or October, and saying, you need to get to your four weeks by 31 December. You’re going to miss out.

There’s a similar issue even with the principal place of residence.

I’ve seen situations where someone was using a property as a PPR and claiming that exemption.

Then they moved. Maybe they moved into a rental, went interstate, went overseas, or something changed.

They never updated it. So they’ve been claiming this exemption on an ongoing basis for land tax, but stopped living there years ago.

Of course, things do catch up with them. The SRO does eventually find it.

But by then, a couple of years have passed and you’ve got penalties on top.

You’re right. You’ve got to think about it year on year and keep it front of mind.

Otherwise, set and forget could mean that you claim an exemption you’re no longer eligible for.

Yeah. And they will have a record of everyone who’s claimed the holiday home exemption.

It would be no big thing for them to write to everyone every few years and say, show us you qualify.

Yep. That’s it. Absolutely.

56:21

We might switch to some ATO updates and High Court watch.

We’ll run through this relatively quickly, just a bit of an update on things in the High Court.

A number of cases that were running had special leave refused, including Chung and Commissioner of Taxation, which is essentially regarding whether certain amounts were gifts or assessable income.

Toowoomba Regional Council, again, special leave was refused. That’s about whether or not a certain car park was subject to fringe benefits tax.

And SKG Cleaning Services, which was regarding the employment agency provisions for payroll tax.

So, the end of the line for all of those ones.

The ones of interest that were at least ongoing at the end of October are Poulton and Conrad, which is essentially about Bitcoin and whether it’s property or not.

It’s not a tax case, but the Commissioner has intervened in that.

Then Uber, which is a payroll tax case, and Merchant, which is a Part IVA dividend stripping case.

Now, we have had decisions. I won’t get into them in this episode, but we have now had decisions in Uber and Merchant.

So stay tuned next month for detailed analysis of those cases.

Yeah. Well, those decisions were handed down, I think, yesterday.

Yeah. So they’re in November. They’re not part of the October updates.

But it would be remiss of us not to at least mention that they’ve been determined.

Yeah.

All right. Well, then that takes us to some ATO updates.

There are some decision impact statements. One is for the case of Hicks, which is a pretty significant case concerning the application of section 45B and Part IVA.

Not wanting to go through this case in too much detail, but there’s this interesting question in Hicks, and it also comes up in the next case of Hilton, which we’ll talk about briefly, about Part IVA and how you determine the alternative postulate, or the counterfactual.

I think the typical approach in most cases is that you just put forward everything you can and see what sticks.

That’s certainly what taxpayers do, and certainly what the ATO does.

I think there’s been a little bit of guidance now around, well, which one do you pick?

As I understand it, it’s really just the most reasonable alternative.

Because Part IVA can’t operate in a vacuum. You’ve got to pick, and there are provisions about it—

58:41

—what would have happened otherwise, essentially, which is the alternative postulate.

Then, how reasonable does that need to be?

Can there be multiple ones? Can the Commissioner choose between three different ones and just pick the one he likes the best?

Or is it more that there is only ever one?

Those are questions that are still somewhat unresolved.

Yeah. Hilton as well.

Part IVA is so nuanced. You can come up with general principles, but you can never be truly sure how it’s going to be applied in your particular circumstances until you go through it yourself, which no one wants to do, of course.

One thing that did come out of this, so Hilton is a case that we’ve talked about previously.

That case is on appeal, although the ATO did issue an interim decision impact statement.

One thing that came out of that case is, I believe, one of Hilton’s counterfactuals on the Part IVA aspects was itself a Part IVA scheme.

I think the courts, and certainly the ATO, have made it clear that, no, your counterfactual cannot be one that’s another Part IVA scheme in and of itself.

Because otherwise you could always find another scheme and say, well, there’s no tax benefit because I could have just done this one.

We would have done that one, so we wouldn’t have paid any tax anyway.

Exactly. Either way, we would always have had a scheme to get out of tax.

Yeah.

Well, let’s cover SMSFs and borrowing and guidance.

We’ve previously talked about the change regarding limited recourse borrowing arrangements now being restricted to business real property.

Following on from that, the ATO has updated a number of existing products to reference this.

So, TD 2016/16, SMSF Ruling 2009/2, PCG 2016/5 and PS LA 2023/1.

Why I thought this was discussion-worthy is that I’ve had a number of conversations since around, look, is that really business real property?

1:01:09

How far does that extend? What if it changes over time? Is that going to cause an issue?

One discussion I had was someone was adamant that commercial zoning determined the issue, and then someone else said, no, you’re wrong.

So it is a live issue, some of these things around business real property.

Essentially, those documents now make it clear what the test actually is.

It is a pretty strict test to be business real property. It needs to be, I think the wording is, solely and exclusively used in business.

Yeah.

There are a number of examples given.

Perhaps two of the most interesting are a situation where you’ve got a tenancy that ends and then there’s a vacancy, and whether or not that is an issue.

In the example, it’s a three-month vacancy while the fund or landlord looks for a new tenant.

Another one is an example of a residential-style building used by an accounting practice that is then leased as a private residence.

That clearly is a problem because it ceases to be business real property at that point.

Even if the residential use then changes back later on, in the example, now to an architect, it’s still a problem because you’ve already breached the section.

Often when breaches occur, the ATO seems to be generally satisfied if the breach is rectified quickly, within a year or two, in my experience.

So potentially, you could get away with that.

For such a short period of time.

But they could still penalise you, potentially, for those two years.

Yes.

I’ve seen that on that point, Aaron. I’ve seen that on temporary, inadvertent ones around minor loans where there’s a unit trust, for example, that really wasn’t ever intended but was an administrative error type of thing.

Yeah.

When the auditors lodge their ACR, I think they actually have to note on there whether it’s now rectified.

If it is, you normally just get a “don’t do that again” kind of letter from the ATO.

Yeah.

It’s an interesting one because, when you look at the unit trusts and shares owned by a fund—

1:03:32

—the law’s quite clear that, if you breach it, it’s disqualified and can never qualify anymore.

Yeah.

But it seems that, in practice, perhaps they apply it a little bit more...

Look, on that, I don’t know that they would let you off on that particular one.

I’ve got one at the moment which is an in-house asset issue, but it’s not shares or units of a related party.

It’s an interest in a rental, and it was used by a related party.

It tainted the asset as an in-house asset. It is no longer used by the related party, but it doesn’t untaint it.

The breach is still there. As long as the asset is over 5%, you’ve still got...

A tainted-it-forever type issue.

Yeah.

Well, I think the technical analysis is that the requirement to dispose of the asset triggered at that earlier point when it was an in-house asset.

If subsequently it no longer meets the definition, that doesn’t get rid of the initial obligation to dispose. That still continues.

The ATO, as far as I’m aware, certainly enforced that.

Yeah.

It is interesting. The consequences are fairly significant.

It’s one thing when you’ve got loan accounts and you can clean those up and repay things.

But when it’s property that’s not compliant, you’re in duties and CGT territory.

You’ve got to get a conveyancer to transfer it. You’ve got to come up with the money to pay the super fund for its interest.

Or you could potentially take it in specie, but only if you satisfy cashing restrictions.

In certain jurisdictions, there’s no duty exemption.

Yeah. New South Wales doesn’t have one, for example, on the way out, whereas Victoria does.

Victoria does. I think Queensland doesn’t as well.

So there’s a whole raft of considerations to clean up property. It’s a lot harder.

It’s much harder.

Yeah.

All right. Let’s move on to the last bit.

We’ve got a ruling from the ATO, TR 2026/D2, which is about carrying on a business.

1:06:00

We’ve always referred to TR 97/11, which is, am I carrying on a business of primary production?

But there are general principles in that which you can apply to any business, and the ATO routinely does so.

This new ruling is specifically about individuals.

One of the things with this ruling is that it is modernised to deal with things like content creators.

Obviously, things have changed a lot since 1997, and the ways people can make money have expanded into ways perhaps no one could have imagined back in 1997.

Influencers didn’t exist.

Influencers didn’t exist.

So there’s an entire online, social media pathway for people to generate income and whatnot.

The really interesting thing is that there are a lot of people who start on the course of content creation online, and not everyone makes it.

Of course, there are some people who make videos and have very limited viewership, and it never becomes anything.

Then you get those people who turn it into something quite significant and valuable.

The difficult question becomes: at what point does it become a business?

In particular, it’s very easy to demonstrate a business once you’ve made it.

With the benefit of hindsight, you’ve made that viral video or created that product and gone gangbusters.

Clearly, you’re carrying on a business.

But at what point? You don’t know exactly if you’re going to be a success or not.

Is it the case that, if you try and fail, then you’re not carrying on a business?

It also depends what you’re wanting from it as well.

If you’re wanting deductions because you’ve got losses, or you’re wanting it not to be income because you’ve got a big gain, or perhaps you’re wanting to apply the small business concessions, they shouldn’t affect it.

But they tend to because, if you’re taking the position the Tax Office is going to be okay about, then who’s going to care at the end of the day?

Yeah, I think that’s right.

You always need to try to guess what the Tax Office is going to think before you adopt a particular position.

We’re dealing with quite a few ATO reviews at the moment on this very issue of business versus hobby, primarily in the primary production space, but not solely.

It feels like they might have some sort of project running internally to focus on this as an issue, which would be consistent with putting out a new—

1:08:23

—draft ruling as well.

We’ve got about 12 or 13 reviews of clients in primary production running right now.

That’s interesting.

None concluded yet, but very similar questions are being asked.

So the question is whether they’re hobby farms versus...

Yeah, hobby farms. Whether you’re really doing it for some benefit or reason other than making money or running a business in a commercial manner.

There are things like, a common one the ATO likes, horse people.

I don’t want to call... I’m not a horse guy, I’m sorry.

Horse people who do it for the purpose of running their horses in races, and they say that generally has a hobby flavour to it.

It’s not generally a business.

But a horse breeding operation, where you’re selling the product to others who might race them or do something else, that’s different.

So there is a bit of subtlety in it.

We’ve had a lot of clients in this space outside primary production as well.

One recent one that comes to mind, which Andrew, you were involved with, was a gambler.

We had to figure out where the line is.

He was quite successful, made money and did it repeatedly.

Yes. And—

1:10:42

—that is a very interesting space because the default position in Australia is that gambling is a hobby.

Is there a line in the sand somewhere?

There is, but is there a line in the sand where, if you’re repeatedly good at it, you make money, go about it in a businesslike manner and start employing people, et cetera, do you cross that threshold at some point?

The gambling one is really interesting because, when you go back over the cases, they’re quite old.

I was kind of surprised that we haven’t had a modern case, given how prevalent gambling is and the levels of sophistication.

Yeah, there are so many new ways you can gamble too, through apps and...

It probably just speaks to how few people actually make money out of it.

That’s right. Most people...

But you mentioned, if you’re persistently doing it and you’re good at it.

What if you’re doing it persistently and you’re very bad at it? You’re persistently bad at it.

It shouldn’t matter. You should still get to the same result at law.

But, as you say, with the benefit of hindsight, it is a lot easier to find a business once you’ve made a lot of money.

That’s right.

I think also from a revenue perspective, if you took them together, there’ll be more people who are losing than winning.

Overall, what do we want here?

I think, if I had to guess, I would say the ATO will probably be reluctant to run a case on gambling in case they lost and that got out there as a precedent.

Because it is so prevalent, literally everybody does it.

Suddenly, you’ll have people latching onto it, going, well, I’m full on those facts, I qualify, I should get my losses.

What about people who buy lottery tickets?

Say every weekend you buy a lottery ticket or you’re part of a syndicate.

I think we generally accept that lottery winnings are not assessable, thank goodness, because some of those lottery winnings are quite sizeable.

Well, I think there’s just no sophistication to that, or very little.

It’s purely chance, isn’t it? There’s no real skill to it.

It just comes down to those indicia of business.

Do you have a business plan? Are you going about it in a businesslike manner? Are you keeping business records?

The answer is probably no to all those things.

My business plan is to win.

Yeah.

I think it’s different where you get 20 different computers and AI agents, models and so forth.

Complexity goes up, and if your capital costs go up as well. Also your expected win percentage and value. I think those things are relevant.

Yeah, I think so.

All right. Well, I guess that pretty much brings us to the end of the agenda for the month.

Yeah. We had an update on the budget changes and cases that covered a number of different areas of CGT fundamentals, GST, FBT, Division 7A and VRLT.

So, a good spread across the board there.

Yeah.

Aaron, I wanted to thank you for coming on.

Your insights are really valuable: what you’re seeing and the technical layer you’ve added as well.

So I really appreciate you being part of this episode.

Yeah, absolute pleasure. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

I would say, buckle up. We’re all in for a very fun time over the next—

1:13:04

—18 to 24 months.

But I think that no one’s going to be looking for work. The work will find us.

Yeah. We’re all going to be very busy.

And make sure you subscribe and tune in to Tax Talks to be at the cutting edge, so you can do that work in the best possible way.

That’s it. Thanks again, Aaron.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Pleasure.