The Future of Indirect Taxation : Recent Trends in VAT and GST Systems Around the World – Australia

This paper provides a detailed outline of most of the major features of the Australian goods and services tax (GST). As well as explaining and evaluating the operation of the GST law, the paper compares the Australian GST with the equivalent features of the European VAT. The paper was first prepared for a Global VAT/GST conference, hosted at Rust in Austria from 9-11 September 2010 by the Institute for Austrian and International Tax law of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The structure of the paper reflects the structure of the VAT questionnaire that formed the basis for the country reports contributed to that conference. That paper was updated after the conference to take account of changes to the law and has since been published as Chapter 2 in Thomas Ecker, Michael Lang, and Ine Lejeune (eds), The Future of Indirect Taxation: Recent Trends in VAT and GST Systems Around the World, Kluwer Law International: The Netherlands (2012)