Non-Religious Tax Avoidance

This raises another problem. It concerns the ATO's current illustration of what a 'scientific institution' is. Their website illustrates their 2012 position by way of an example:

An institution is set up to hold conferences and meetings on aspects of engineering. Any professional advantage the engineer members gain is only through the institution's advancement of science.

This is contrasted to a 'scientific association'. The example they give is:

A group of frog enthusiasts set up a non-profit society to  observe frogs in the district and record changes in their types, numbers and habits. The society is established for the encouragement of science.

These current definitions seem a long way from the characterisation of the AFA by the ATO as a 'principally scientific institution established for the study of the science of philosophy and the propagation of study outcomes for a public purpose.'

Were a like-minded secular organisation to apply for tax-exempt status today based on the 1999 definition, it would seem unlikely to succeed.

At the heart of the AFA's 1997 complaint was the idea that since religion obtained tax-exempt status and atheism could not, this was a clear example of discrimination. The argument was made in the article 'Taxing the Godless Religiously' by Samela Harris in issue 88 of The Atheist Newsletter. The problem with thisprima facie discrimination argument is that it overlooks the other more secular possibility stated by Geoffrey Robertson at the Atheist Convention,

... the proper answer to this egregious discrimination is to abolish tax breaks for all religions.

If no belief or non-belief organisation is receiving tax breaks, I argue, then the government's relationship to both religion and atheism etc. is strictly secular: it favours none of them because what citizens believe or do not believe should be no business of government. As taxpayers we should not be cross-subsidising each other's belief, or lack of it.

This approach would have the benefit of cutting the ground beneath the feet of the religionist smear that secularism, as a form of government, is anti-religion. If no one is receiving tax exemption on the grounds of their belief or lack of it, government is strictly neutral and discrimination disappears.

In appealing for tax-exempt status, while at the same time decrying the tax-exempt status of religion through its publications, the AFA was, and remains, in my view, compromised.

To add more irony to the mix, a journalist contacted me recently and pointed out that the Australian Securities Investment Commission website shows that the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) received tax-exempt status as a religious organisation in 2005. They have kept quiet about it. So two diametrically opposed organisations – AFA and the ACL – are both tax-exempt.