AUSTRALIA
The Age
March 25, 2016
Meredith Doig
Religious groups are not taxable. No wonder there’s no transparency in how their billions of dollars are spent.
Whether or not you are a practising Christian, Easter is a time to think about religious traditions.
The ongoing proceedings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the cover-ups so long perpetrated within religious institutions are added reason to do so this year. So, too, is the trial at the Vatican of two investigative journalists for accessing secret Vatican documents about financial corruption and incompetence.
There’s a lot to reflect on here, for the religious and the non-religious alike. Right now, we are also embroiled in the politics of the forthcoming federal budget and no issue is more important or more entangled in obfuscation than that of tax reform. The confluence of these things is worth considering, because the tax-exempt status of religious organisations in this country is a much-neglected topic and one which ought finally to be seriously addressed.
I believe in the application of reason to public policy, as distinct from the application of lobbying by special interest groups. But the application of reason requires considerable transparency. Special interests work hard to shield their interests from the public gaze and lobby behind closed doors.
Religious organisations are among such special interest groups. Under Australian law, religious organisations are exempt from taxation. This exempts something of the order of $30 billion a year from taxation. The Catholic Church accounts for half of that. It is bigger than all the others combined, pulling in about $16 billion annually.
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