For those of you, who have been following the Anon vs Scientology issue, as I know many of you fervently have, you will know that a inquiry has been approved by the senate. The gist of it is that there should be a Public Benefit Test for charities seeking tax exemption, similar to the one in the UK. Scientology did not pass this test in the UK and is currently claiming to be a South Australian charity, effectively dodging the tax bill in the UK.
Now before you post anything in response, please note that it is a federal offence to attempt to prevent somebody from submitting to a senate inquiry, so before you go "you're a fag for caring about this shit" stop and, don't.
Here's a running list of accepted submissions.
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/economics_ctte/public_benefit_test_10/submissions.htm Very interesting stuff in there. Notice how some Christian groups have already chimed in. This test will affect them and they are concerned that having done very little charitable work, their tax exemption will be taken away. Rightly so as well. A personal anecdote: A former colleague belonged to a small congregation of protestant or pentecostal Christians (don't remember which). The way they did things was that they obliged members to contribute a 10% tithe to the church (somewhere in the bible it says that you must). With this money they hired premises and basically did whatever the fuck they wanted without support from any large established church. My colleague said that whilst he liked the group, it's where he met his wife, etc...he objected to the tithe requirement due to a lack of transparency on the part of the management as to what was being done with their cash. In fact he stopped paying it and was placed in not-so-good standing with the church because of that. Now, a group such as that is entitled to tax exemption, based in part on a Supreme Court ruling from 1983, related to Scientology, that a fairly loose requirement of a confession to a belief in a deity qualifies you as a religion and therefore tax exemption. The court refused to review it on the basis that it will be tantamount to reviewing the freedom of speech and association. A giant backlog of complaints against scientology and others with the DPP remains unaddressed. So yeah. The public benefit test may cause these people to loose their tax exemption, which is why you, the taxpayer may wish to look into this further. This could be very big news in August when the results are due in.
Meanwhile, if you wish to make a submission, the deadline is June 18 and here's the "how to and where":
http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?t=18185
