NSW budget 2017: Winners and losers - Inaugural Vodka Night

RNC Contractor Exposes Data on Nearly 200M Voters: Should You Be Worried? “Perhaps the largest known exposure of voter information in history.”

New South Wales Treasurer Dominic Perrottet has handed down his first budget. Take a look at who gets what and who misses out.

NSW budget 2017: Winners and losers

NSW Budget 2017/18

The New South Wales Treasurer, Mr Dominic Perrottet, handed down the NSW Budget for 2017/18 on 20 June 2017. The Treasurer announced the following tax and related measures:

· Housing affordability - the following measures were announced to improve housing affordability:

- first home buyers will be exempt from transfer duty on new or existing properties valued up to $650,000, with discounts for values up to $800,000, from 1 July 2017

- the First Home Owner Grant will continue to be available for buyers of new homes valued up to $600,000, and for those building their first home valued at up to $750,000, but will not longer be available for other buyers from 1 July 2017

- insurance duty on lenders mortgage insurance will be abolished, from 1 July 2017

- the foreign investor transfer duty surcharge will increase to 8% (from 4%) and the land tax surcharge will increase to 2% (from 0.75%), from the 2018 land tax year

- to avoid placing foreign-owned residential property developers at a competitive disadvantage due to the application of the foreign investor surcharges, Australian-based foreign-owned residential property developers will be granted a refund of surcharges paid provided that the developed properties are sold within five years, with the new arrangements backdated to apply from the commencement of the surcharges, and

- the existing concession allowing a delay of payment of duty of up to 12 months for residential off-the-plan purchases will be restricted to be available to owner occupiers only.

· Insurance duty - small businesses with aggregate turnover less than $2m will be exempt from insurance duty on their premiums for commercial vehicle insurance, professional indemnity insurance, and product and public liability insurance from 1 January 2018, and insurance duty on crop and livestock insurance will be abolished from 1 January 2018.

Source: NSW Government budget website; Budget 2017/18 Overview, 20 June 2016.

NSW budget 2017-18: Dominic Perrottet distributes spoils of a healthy budget

The National Press Club presents our Inaugural Vodka Night

Friday, 11 August 2017

– Canapés and a Four Course Dinner –

Starts at 6PM

$110 Members, $140 Non-Members

Featuring the local Canberra Distillery Vodka,
Underground Vodka and Heaven’s Hell Vodka from Sydney plus other award winning vodka from around the world.

Games, prizes and fun.

Limited tickets, Don’t miss out!

Book here now

Travel: Scenes of the TV crimes

Trust the Kiwis

Recent figures released by the New Zealand government show users and abusers of trusts abandoning the country after it implemented transparency laws to regulate the trust industry.

New Zealand trusts have built up a particularly good reputation amongst offshore service providers for their ability to hide assets. They have been called the “Fort Knox of asset protection”.

But in response to the Panama Papers the New Zealand government changed the law to compel all New Zealand foreign trusts to register (a foreign trust being a New Zealand trust where the money comes from a resident outside New Zealand), and provide details of who benefits from the trust, and who controls it.

Given that there are of course many entirely legitimate reasons why someone would want to hold an offshore, tax free trust, we would of course expect operators and beneficiaries of trusts to welcome such transparency!

Well it seems not. Recent data revealed in response to parliamentary questions from New Zealand's Green Party shows that weeks ahead of the deadline to register trusts, most trusts have failed to register and many have abandoned New Zealand. In total, out of more than 11,500 foreign trusts in New Zealand, fewer than 70 had signed up to the new register three weeks before the deadline for doing so.

This of course strongly suggests that many of the people using New Zealand trusts were doing so to hide their money. From whom? We don’t know, and perhaps never will.