Ebay threatens to ban Australian buyers - Will other sellers do likewise?

(This is relevant to 'Ancient Coin' collectors like me, and to 'Ancient Coin' sellers.) Ebay has threatened to ban Australian buyers (from buying from overseas sellers) if the Federal Government goes ahead with their threatened introduction of a "Goods and Services Tax" on ALL sales - making Ebay (and other sellers) the 'de-facto' tax gatherer, without being able to force Ebay to on-pay the Tax to the Australian Government. (Currently Tax is gathered at the border on 'new' items with a combined 'cost plus postage' value in excess of A$1000.)

See http://www.smh.com.au/business/reta...ralian-shoppers-over-gst-20170417-gvmkoe.html

 

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Thanks for sharing that article, I have been wondering how this is going to work and if auction houses like NN will collect tax as they are probably under the yearly turnover limit to Australians and if at all ancient coins being "second hand, not new" fall under the GST from overseas.

 

I doubt it will happen. It will be an extremely unpopular election-losing move. The Australian Government cannot expect every international seller or sales venue to register for the Australian tax system.

What if the governments in other countries imposed similar legislation on international sellers? Can we reasonably expect a seller to do the paperwork, and collect tax, for every country in the world? It's unworkable.

 

I hope you are right. The same could happen nearly everywhere.

 

Once one government somewhere figures out how to collect more money from people with no say, other's will follow. It must be stopped before the first one passes something ridiculous like this.

 

The same can be said for so many things in life.

 

Not just Ebay, also Amazon and a lot of other online retail giants having a whinge about it.......http://www.theage.com.au/business/t...t-comply-with-gst-change-20170420-gvorgv.html

 

The most sensible solution I've seen so far, is to have Australia Post collect the tax on the declared value of the parcels. At least that's enforceable... Whether they collect enough tax to pay for the extra admin and to make the exercise worthwhile is another question. Also this means everybody has to go to the post office to pick up their parcels & pay, so there will be big queues - unless they come up with an online paying solution. It will be a huge pain edited to the end user.

As it stands, the proposed legislation is even worse - I can't believe they're actually releasing it as a policy without even considering some really obvious issues. Everybody loses, especially the customer.

 

I agree, but ancient coins I don't because the reason they a bringing the tax in was not to collect revenue because it costs just as much to administer, it was because a few years ago our bricks and mortar shop fronts were getting killed when our dollar was high now its down 25% buying overseas is not as attractive. And as for ancients there is hardly any here anyway to compete with.

 

The Gillard labour government structured the new tax. That explains that.

 

Which is the way with parcels entering the UK. We pay a tax on everything over £19 with often an administration fee of an additional £8. Obviously things are declared as gifts or the value under declared but this is tax evasion that could cost.

 

Yeah that system makes more sense.