Apologies in order

I think apologies are in order. You may notice that the name of this blog is Something Besides Tax, and even the URL is nottax.blogspot.com. And YET, I accidentally sneaked in a reference to tax in my last blog entry.

I shall further my previous transgression by perhaps shedding some light on the reference to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936. In case you didn't know, there are currently TWO main laws with govern income tax in Australia. The Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (ITAA1936), and the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (ITAA1997). Until the mid 90's, we only had the ITAA1936, and it was very unwieldy, voluminous, and written in not-very-easy-to-understand legalese.

To make it clearer, and easier for lay people to understand, the then Keating Government initiated the Tax Law Improvement Project (or 'TLIP'). Its task was to re-write, in several stages, the old ITAA1936, into a new, better structured ITAA 1997. After a couple of phases, some parts of the ITAA1936 were removed, and replaced by the new ITAA 1997. However, until the TLIP was completely finished, we would have to use BOTH acts CONCURRENTLY.

When the Howard Government came to power in 1996, the priorities had changed. GST was the new big priority, and we published whatever we had redrafted into the ITAA 1997. (it was introduced in Parliament in 1995, and enacted in 1997). The project has been put on hold indefinitely.

So that's what I meant when I mentioned the ITAA 1936 with reference to cleaning the Colosseum. It took 4 years to clean about half of the outside. Funny, it only took 8 years to build the thing in the first place, and that was 2000 years ago.