Bikes and tax

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does?

you think I can s/s the Mavic Ksyrium ESs I've been thinking about?!? 🙂

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does? In the UK you
can get you company to buy a bike for you and you pay the cost via your
salary minus the tax (or something like that, I'm not totally sure). Is
there anything vaguely like that here? You can salary sacrifice the
cost of cars and their maintenance, so one would think that other
methods of transport should count too (Oi! Stop laughing at the back
there!) or should I go back to cloud cuckoo land where these thoughts
clearly came from?

Graeme

I seem to recall that this has been discussed a few times. I'd be trying to slip in a yearly public transport ticket as well 🙂 It'd still be cheaper than running a car.

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does? In the UK you
can get you company to buy a bike for you and you pay the cost via your
salary minus the tax (or something like that, I'm not totally sure). Is
there anything vaguely like that here? You can salary sacrifice the
cost of cars and their maintenance, so one would think that other
methods of transport should count too (Oi! Stop laughing at the back
there!) or should I go back to cloud cuckoo land where these thoughts
clearly came from?

Graeme

I asked about this through our Uni Environment Department (ANUGreen)
since we can salary sacrifice cars at ANU. This was the reply:

<quote>
We thought of this many years ago, and have been working on it for some
time. The problem is with Fringe Benefits Tax. It seems that there are
no issues if you want to SS [salary sacrifice] a car (as long as you
estimate the K's you will travel correctly), but if you want to include
bike purchase, bike hire or bus tickets then 100% FBT applies. Which is
a big problem. This has been recognised by many sustainable transport
people, and there is some lobbying around this at present. The tax
situation must be different in the UK.
</quote>
--
Bean

Remove "yourfinger" before replying

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does? In the UK you
can get you company to buy a bike for you and you pay the cost via your
salary minus the tax (or something like that, I'm not totally sure). Is
there anything vaguely like that here? You can salary sacrifice the
cost of cars and their maintenance, so one would think that other
methods of transport should count too (Oi! Stop laughing at the back
there!) or should I go back to cloud cuckoo land where these thoughts
clearly came from?

huge tax advantages in riding bikes - you don't pay tax on fuel (basic
food is GST free), you don't pay stamp duty on purchases etc etc etc

Stop groveling for middleclass welfare, and ride yer bike!

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does?

No, it doesn't. Lobby for it!

Travis

Bleve said:

Stop groveling for middleclass welfare, and ride yer bike!

Who's grovelling? If such a thing did exist and I didn't take advantage
of it then I'd be a bloody idiot, or is "middleclass welfare" only
acceptable for car drivers in your eyes? The bike will be bought
irrespective of any tax advantages, although it probably won't include
a hub dynamo now 🙁

Graeme

Graeme Dods said:

Bleve said:

Stop groveling for middleclass welfare, and ride yer bike!

Who's grovelling? If such a thing did exist and I didn't take advantage
of it then I'd be a bloody idiot,

Lots of people here [censored] on about how they think bikes should get a tax
break, but they miss the big picture, IMO. Bikes already out-sell
cars, bikes get a lot less tax than cars (stamp duty, fuel, tolls etc)
etc etc. The financial advantages of cycling are massive compared to
the drone in the car. I'd never be able to afford to live the way I do
if I was wasting $heaps on car payments, fuel etc.

Quoted message said:

or is "middleclass welfare" only
acceptable for car drivers in your eyes? The bike will be bought
irrespective of any tax advantages, although it probably won't include
a hub dynamo now 🙁

The s/s rort for cars is a social problem, which would only be a
further step in the wrong direction if it was extended to
bikes/horses/walking shoes etc. Sooner or later, someone has to
actually -pay- for our roads, hospitals, schools etc and dodging tax
costs us all in the end. Do you realise how much less tax you pay if
you ride places rather than drive anyway? How much fuel would you not
have to buy, and thus save tax on? * (around 50% of the cost of fuel is
tax if I recall the figures correctly). Say roughly 40l of fuel a week
for the average car commuter? That's around $55p/w in fuel (this week,
and it will only get worse), around $25 in tax per week. How much is
that hub dynamo you want the taxpayer to subsidise again? You get a
monster tax break by not driving the damn car in the first place. What
more do you want? Ride yer bike!

* - yes, I see the contradiction, but by riding rather than driving,
the overall cost to society is a lot lower, which I think more than
offsets the tax loss from not buying fuel and burning it while idling
in a traffic jam.

Travis said:

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does?

No, it doesn't. Lobby for it!

A friend of mine has just bought himself and business partner new MTBs
at $3000 each through their business as sponsorship for them both. Nice
work if you can get it. I'm a salary man, so no such luck.

Donga

Bleve said:

* - yes, I see the contradiction, but by riding rather than driving,
the overall cost to society is a lot lower, which I think more than
offsets the tax loss from not buying fuel and burning it while idling
in a traffic jam.

What if I get hungry while waiting for a red light? Am I wasting the energy 😄 Or increasing my impact on society?

quote='Donga'Travis said:

Graeme Dods said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does?

No, it doesn't. Lobby for it!

A friend of mine has just bought himself and business partner new MTBs
at $3000 each through their business as sponsorship for them both. Nice
work if you can get it. I'm a salary man, so no such luck.

Donga[/QUOTE]
Let us know what happens when they get a tax audit (I assume they are not paying FBT on the bikes which ARE almost certainly fringe benefits in their hands, even if they are describing them as "sponsorship"😉*

* I ain't no tax lawyer or tax accountant

SteveA

Graeme Dods said:

Bleve said:

Stop groveling for middleclass welfare, and ride yer bike!

Who's grovelling? If such a thing did exist and I didn't take advantage
of it then I'd be a bloody idiot, or is "middleclass welfare" only
acceptable for car drivers in your eyes? The bike will be bought
irrespective of any tax advantages, although it probably won't include
a hub dynamo now 🙁

Graeme

Given how stoopid environmentally our government(s) are, did you
seriously expect they would?
In Denmark, they give priority on public housing to cyclists for their
lower environmental profile. Here, they'd laugh at you. China
manufactures half a million 500 watt electric bicycles per year, ideal
for city commuting.
And how many do we import? Zero. Our archaic licencing laws ban them. If
you want to live somewhere with some real environmental cred, you're
going to have to find the magical land of Somewhere Else. It sure as
f--- ain't here, that's for sure.

SteveA said:

Donga said:

Travis said:

Graeme Dods wrote:
> I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort

of

Quoted message said:

> tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does?

No, it doesn't. Lobby for it!

A friend of mine has just bought himself and business partner new MTBs
at $3000 each through their business as sponsorship for them both. Nice
work if you can get it. I'm a salary man, so no such luck.

Donga

Let us know what happens when they get a tax audit (I assume they are
not paying FBT on the bikes which ARE almost certainly fringe benefits
in their hands, even if they are describing them as "sponsorship"😉*

* I ain't no tax lawyer or tax accountant

SteveA

--
SteveA

I'm looking forward to my massive tax refund given the incessant
bleating that cyclists pay no taxes. I just never find the tick box on
the tax form where I can say that I am a cyclist...

PiledHigher

Quoted message said:

I'm probably living in hope here, but does Australia have any sort of
tax incentive for buying bikes the same as the UK does? In the UK you
can get you company to buy a bike for you and you pay the cost via your
salary minus the tax (or something like that, I'm not totally sure). Is
there anything vaguely like that here? You can salary sacrifice the
cost of cars and their maintenance, so one would think that other
methods of transport should count too (Oi! Stop laughing at the back
there!) or should I go back to cloud cuckoo land where these thoughts
clearly came from?

Graeme

In the Netherlands we have the system you can buy every three years a
bike if you use that to commute to your work or of a public transport
station.

The maximum amount is eur 750. This amount you can deduct from your
salary for the income tax. As well you can pay this amount by offering
some holiday days, again where gross wages = nett wages.

Served be in buying two racing bikes (which I sometimes use to go to
work, but the bike I use to go to the railway station (1,5 km) is, you
guess, a lot older and in no way any interesting object for stealing,
which happens a lot here by junkies and other kind of irregulated
living creatures.

Martin

--
Posted by news://news.nb.nu

Quoted message said:

Do you realise how much less tax you pay if you ride places rather than drive anyway?
Say roughly 40l of fuel a week for the average car commuter? That's around $55p/w in fuel
(this week, and it will only get worse), around $25 in tax per week. How much is that hub dynamo
you want the taxpayer to subsidise again? You get a monster tax break by not driving the damn car
in the first place. What more do you want?

Some people have long commutes, but 10k each way is a reasonable
average, i.e. 100 km per week. The typical small car (like mine,
bought in 1990) uses about 7 litres per 100 km for urban driving. Tax
on 7 litres = 7 * (.38 + .14 GST, assuming $1.40 per litre) = $3.64.
That's peanuts compared with the health benefits of cycling.

The BFA estimated that if another 40% of Australians took regular,
moderate and effective exercise the community would save $2.4
billion/year in reduced costs associated with heart disease, low back
pain, absenteeism and workplace productivity. So the savings to the
country from cycling to work are more than twice the petrol tax for a
100 km weekly commute - and that doesn't even include the cost of air
pollution (see
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/atmos_enviro_health/2005-July/000028.html)
or global warming.

So yes, I'd like to see governments offer tax incentives for bike
commutes, instead of for cars, because it should eventually save money
and so reduce taxes for everyone. This benefits me as a cyclist, not
only because I might end up paying less tax, but more cycling means
more safety in numbers, so my commute is more enjoyable and in all
probablitity safer.

Saying that we get a tax break from not driving to work is like saying
we get a tax break from not smoking. Far better to remind people
(including governments, who are influenced by public opinion) that the
whole community will benefit if they do more to encourage cycling.

Have fun, and keep riding,
Dorre

Dorre said:

Quoted message said:

Do you realise how much less tax you pay if you ride places rather than drive anyway?
Say roughly 40l of fuel a week for the average car commuter? That's around $55p/w in fuel
(this week, and it will only get worse), around $25 in tax per week. How much is that hub dynamo
you want the taxpayer to subsidise again? You get a monster tax break by not driving the damn car
in the first place. What more do you want?

Some people have long commutes, but 10k each way is a reasonable
average, i.e. 100 km per week. The typical small car (like mine,
bought in 1990) uses about 7 litres per 100 km for urban driving. Tax
on 7 litres = 7 * (.38 + .14 GST, assuming $1.40 per litre) = $3.64.
That's peanuts compared with the health benefits of cycling.

The BFA estimated that if another 40% of Australians took regular,
moderate and effective exercise the community would save $2.4
billion/year in reduced costs associated with heart disease, low back
pain, absenteeism and workplace productivity. So the savings to the
country from cycling to work are more than twice the petrol tax for a
100 km weekly commute - and that doesn't even include the cost of air
pollution (see
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/atmos_enviro_health/2005-July/000028.html)
or global warming.

So yes, I'd like to see governments offer tax incentives for bike
commutes, instead of for cars, because it should eventually save money
and so reduce taxes for everyone. This benefits me as a cyclist, not
only because I might end up paying less tax, but more cycling means
more safety in numbers, so my commute is more enjoyable and in all
probablitity safer.

Rather than beg for handouts, why not make car drivers pay properly for
the damage they do?

On 2006-05-27, Bleve (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:

Quoted message said:

Dorre said:

Some people have long commutes, but 10k each way is a reasonable
average, i.e. 100 km per week. The typical small car (like mine,
bought in 1990) uses about 7 litres per 100 km for urban driving. Tax
on 7 litres = 7 * (.38 + .14 GST, assuming $1.40 per litre) = $3.64.
That's peanuts compared with the health benefits of cycling.

I believe I see another Letter to Ed in the making.

Is that all the tax though? People (with inherent biases, naturally)
have claimed that the taxes are about half the cost of the petrol.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

So yes, I'd like to see governments offer tax incentives for bike
commutes, instead of for cars, because it should eventually save money
and so reduce taxes for everyone. This benefits me as a cyclist, not
only because I might end up paying less tax, but more cycling means
more safety in numbers, so my commute is more enjoyable and in all
probablitity safer.

Rather than beg for handouts, why not make car drivers pay properly for
the damage they do?

Because unfortunately, none of our polical parties that are in any
position to take a majority now, are gutless enough to risk a loss of
votes on an issue that most people are too stupid to understand.

So let's propose the next most desirable solution.

--
TimC
VBScript is designed to be a secure programming environment. It
lacks various commands that can be potentially damaging if used in
a malicious manner. This added security is critical in enterprise
solutions. -- support.microsoft.com

Bleve said:

* - yes, I see the contradiction, but by riding rather than driving,
the overall cost to society is a lot lower, which I think more than
offsets the tax loss from not buying fuel and burning it while idling
in a traffic jam.

A variety of things go into tax policy besides "fairness" and "user
pays".

Part of the role of tax policy is to provide an incentive for people to
do what is in the interest of the society and a disincentive against
what is not. Cigarettes and booze are heavily taxed largely because a
lot of harm comes from them and the govt wants to create a disincentive
to consume lots of them. The same for fuel excise etc.

Whether or not it would be "fair" to do so, a rational government would
weigh up whether or not creating tax breaks for cyclists would create
greater benefits than it costs.

Benefits include environmental benefits, health improvement and a
reduction in healthcare costs related to lack of exercise (diabetes
etc), reducion of traffic and wear and tear on the roads, lower road
toll, reduction of our petroleum consumption with all the benefits that
has for trade deficits, not helping enrich dodgy oil regimes etc.

There is a page on a government web site that I saw not long ago
reviewing a whole bunch of economic studies into bicycling which showed
that every dollar the government spent on encouraging cycling returned
many times that amount in total savings.

So it would simply be rational economic policy for the government to
provide tax incentives for cyclists, if doing so would result in
greater numbers of people riding instead.

Do we need a tax deduction on a Campy Record groupset? No. Is it
truly in the best interests of the community to allow people to
purchase $2,000 wheelsets for racing purposes from pre-tax income? No,
not really. But I know that people have such a hangup about paying tax
that the idea of getting a tax deduction causes a major shift in
people's behaviour.

Note the way people act with the 4c off fuel vouchers from Coles and
Woolworths. The amount saved per tank isn't much at all, but its a big
deal to people.

People behave irratioally when it comes to saving money and getting tax
breaks. If the government can be persuaded that exploiting this
irrationality is good for the country, they will provide tax incentives
to ride a bike and public transport.

Travis

Rather than beg for handouts, why not make car drivers pay properly for
the damage they do?[/QUOTE]

I don't think people asking for cycling tax-breaks are begging for middle-class handouts, its' just that many motorists don't pay at all for their motoring consumption. Many people I know (in 2 car housholds) have 1, and sometimes both cars, as company cars and they don't pay any ownership/running costs at all. You may argue that they are forgoing income in the form of a car, and thus are "paying" something, but this situation does not encourage responsible consumption and indeed encourages over use of the car. I'm all for removing tax concessions that encourage company cars rather than giving cyclists tax-breaks, but as the former ain't going to happen in a hurry, then why not lobby for tax incentives for cyclists.

Pat

Travis said:

Bleve said:

* - yes, I see the contradiction, but by riding rather than driving,
the overall cost to society is a lot lower, which I think more than
offsets the tax loss from not buying fuel and burning it while idling
in a traffic jam.

A variety of things go into tax policy besides "fairness" and "user
pays".

Of course.

Quoted message said:

Part of the role of tax policy is to provide an incentive for people to
do what is in the interest of the society and a disincentive against
what is not. Cigarettes and booze are heavily taxed largely because a
lot of harm comes from them and the govt wants to create a disincentive
to consume lots of them. The same for fuel excise etc.

Whether or not it would be "fair" to do so, a rational government would
weigh up whether or not creating tax breaks for cyclists would create
greater benefits than it costs.

Benefits include environmental benefits, health improvement and a
reduction in healthcare costs related to lack of exercise (diabetes
etc), reducion of traffic and wear and tear on the roads, lower road
toll, reduction of our petroleum consumption with all the benefits that
has for trade deficits, not helping enrich dodgy oil regimes etc.

There is a page on a government web site that I saw not long ago
reviewing a whole bunch of economic studies into bicycling which showed
that every dollar the government spent on encouraging cycling returned
many times that amount in total savings.

Sure, and that, I think, is best spent on education, improving
blackspots and so on.
A perfectly servicable commuter pushbike can be had for around $300.
$500 for a very nice one. Costs stufflall to run. Is, unfortunatly,
fully imported from a sweatshop in China or Taiwan though.

Encouraging people to buy something that stats show they're already
buying in GREATER NUMBERS THAN CARS, seems a bit pointless. They're
ALREADY DOING IT!

What has to happen is for these bikes to be ridden as alternatives to
driving. That's not a factor of the bike, it's a factor of the
facilities & culture.

Quoted message said:

So it would simply be rational economic policy for the government to
provide tax incentives for cyclists, if doing so would result in
greater numbers of people riding instead.

*IF* doing so would result in greater numbers riding instead, sure. But
would it? They (the general punters) are ALREADY buying more pushbikes
than cars. There's millions of bicycles out there. Encourage to ride,
yes, improve facilities, yes, ads on TV promoting bicycle riding as a
viable alternative, yes. Making a $500 bike $50 cheaper (or, really,
just shuffling where the profit goes, the LBS's and wholesalers will
soak up any tax chanegs pretty quickly)? No.

Quoted message said:

Do we need a tax deduction on a Campy Record groupset? No. Is it
truly in the best interests of the community to allow people to
purchase $2,000 wheelsets for racing purposes from pre-tax income? No,
not really. But I know that people have such a hangup about paying tax
that the idea of getting a tax deduction causes a major shift in
people's behaviour.

Note the way people act with the 4c off fuel vouchers from Coles and
Woolworths. The amount saved per tank isn't much at all, but its a big
deal to people.

People behave irratioally when it comes to saving money and getting tax
breaks. If the government can be persuaded that exploiting this
irrationality is good for the country, they will provide tax incentives
to ride a bike and public transport.

I'd rather play to intelligence, than stupidity. YMMV.