Is Fiscal "Fortress Australia" a Legal Sandcastle? The Emperors' New Taxes on Singaporeans and other Aliens

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Is Fiscal “Fortress Australia” a Legal Sandcastle? The Emperors’ New Taxes on Singaporeans and other Aliens

SYNOPSIS

This presentation considers the additional taxation that many Australian jurisdictions have sought to impose on foreign ownership of property, against the backdrop of some of Australia’s international tax obligations. Such foreigner-specific taxes would appear to be incompatible with expansive non-discrimination clauses contained in a number of international tax agreements to which Australia is a party. Interestingly, nationals of polities with agreements that have no applicable non-discrimination clauses (such as Singapore and China) or those of countries with no relevant tax treaty, might, pursuant to Australian constitutional law, also be able to rely on the aforesaid incompatibility for relevant relief. The ramifications of such incompatibility in terms of the potential for non-compliance with Australian domestic human rights legislation, will also be canvassed.

SPEAKER

Mr Eu-Jin Teo
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Business and Economics
The University of Melbourne

Eu-Jin Teo is a prize-winning Senior Lecturer at The University of Melbourne, whose interdisciplinary research into the appropriate governance of interactions between legal persons straddles the boundaries of public and private law.

Co-author of Taxation Law in Context (by Oxford University Press) and an updating author of Halsbury’s Laws of Australia, he has been an Editorial Board member of the Melbourne University Law Review, is a former Editor of the Journal of Australian Taxation and is a member of the Law Institute’s Taxation and Revenue Committee, State Taxes Committee, and Administrative Review and Constitutional Law Committee, which he previously chaired.

Eu-Jin’s work has been cited by the High Court of Australia, during proceedings in Parliament, in The Routledge Companion to Financial Accounting Theory, by The Australian Financial Review, and by the late Justice Graham Hill, who was widely regarded as the leading tax judge in Australia before his Honour’s passing.

CHAIR

Dr Vincent Ooi
Assistant Professor of Law
Singapore Management University

DETAILS

Date: 19 February 2024, Monday

Time: 12 noon to 1:15pm

Venue: Meeting Room 5-04, Level 5, Yong Pung How School of Law, SMU

(Bento lunch will be provided)

REGISTRATION

Please click HERE to register