Land tax and trusts in Australia

Abstract Land tax is a state-based tax imposed throughout Australia. It is an effective tax to enforce, and compliance is relatively straightforward. Because trusts are used in Australia for charitable, personal and business purposes, they often hold land, and case law suggests that where legislation creates categories of trusts for taxing purposes, the usual common law and equitable rules that understand these entities cannot be exclusively relied upon for the purposes of determining the kind of trust contemplated by the state land tax legislation. Nonetheless, these are important considerations for the drafting of trust deeds since the categorisation of the trust is central to determining the category into which it falls for the purposes of state land tax ascertainment.