The application of vacant residential land tax to holiday homes has caused much anxiety recently, particularly where that holiday home is held in a trust.

NALI/NALE has been a hot topic in recent years. Now the dust has settled, this two part article will examine the rules interactions with trusts.

Green finance in Australia aims to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy while providing economic growth opportunities.

The use of a rarely used “anti-avoidance” provision, which triggers landholder duty when there is a change of control of the trustee of a unit trust, has been upheld by VCAT.

Non-arm’s length income (NALI) has been a hot topic of discussion and debate in the SMSF industry in recent years, in particular since the ATO first released their draft ruling on non-arm’s length expenditure (NALE) in 2018 (and its subsequent iterations). Recently, the long debated amendments to NALE provisions were passed in Parliament and received Royal Assent in June 2024.

In the current economic landscape, business owners may be considering a restructure, merger, or demerger to adapt, survive, or enable growth. A change in the structure of a business typically involves either the transfer of ownership interests in the entire business or of specific assets of the business. The disposal of an ownership interest in a business or its assets may trigger tax consequences for the business or business owners on capital or revenue account.

Whilst the saying, “the two certainties in life are death and taxes”, is still as relevant as ever, the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (ITAA 1936) and the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (ITAA 1997) does at least provide a bit of leeway on the second one.[1] This session explores various exemptions and concessions available when it comes to tax and deceased estates, including:

The power to remove and appoint a trustee is widely accepted to be fiduciary in nature, exercised for the benefit of the beneficiaries of the trust, not the benefit of the appointor.

The small business capital gains tax (CGT) concessions (Concessions) in Division 152 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (ITAA 97) offer significant opportunities to reduce or eliminate tax levied on capital gains.1 However, despite a recent judicial pronouncement that the Concessions should be interpreted beneficially,2 the legislative conditions for relief are intricate and complex.

Validly executed distribution resolutions or minutes are critical to ensuring that the correct beneficiaries are entitled to trust distributions.

In the current economic landscape, business owners may be considering a restructure, merger, or demerger to adapt, survive, or enable growth. A change in the structure of a business typically involves either the transfer of ownership interests in the entire business or of specific assets of the business.

1. The High Court has described the trust as a “…creature of equity…” subject to the jurisdiction of a court of equity. The essential feature of every trust is that one person is an owner of property, but is bound to use their position as owner for the benefit of another or for the advancement of a purpose.

Drafting is an art form which requires precision, practice and preferably access to a large bank of precedents to assist in tailoring what is required to the circumstances and by the parties the subject of an agreement.

Challenges to death benefits and binding death benefit nominations (BDBNs) have been regularly popping up in court decisions for last couple of decades.

This paper has been built on a previous paper on the superannuation guarantee (SG) regime, titled Super Guarantee – no longer the toothless tiger. That paper was designed to take a holistic examination of the SG regime. In this paper, we have built on that approach and added a number of developments, including:

As soon as the business or investment structure involves entities such as companies, it is inevitable that there will be intra-group loans arising from either:

The small business capital gains tax (CGT) concessions (Concessions) in Division 152 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (ITAA 97) offer significant opportunities to reduce or eliminate tax levied on capital gains.

In the current economic landscape, business owners may be considering a restructure, merger, or demerger to adapt, survive, or enable growth.