Treasury Laws Amendment (Fairer for Families and Farmers and Other Measures) 2024

✦ Plain-English Summary

# Treasury Laws Amendment (Fairer for Families and Farmers and Other Measures) 2024

## What it does
This is a catch-all bill that makes several changes to financial and tax laws. It stops an old government project to modernise business registries, increases funding for affordable housing, strengthens penalties for breaching industry codes, and tweaks various tax and foreign investment rules.

## Why it matters
The housing funding boost could mean more affordable homes. Stronger penalties for industry codes mean big companies that break the rules face harsher consequences. The changes to tax rules mainly affect charities and investment rules, which indirectly impacts what tax deductions people and organisations can claim.

## Key details

- **Housing boost**: The cap on the Housing Australia Special Account is increased, freeing up more money to build affordable homes.

- **Stronger penalties**: Companies breaching industry codes (like banks or energy retailers) now face bigger fines, making it more costly to misbehave.

- **Registries program scrapped**: An expensive, years-long plan to modernise how ASIC handles company registries is being cancelled, and affected staff are being transferred elsewhere.

- **Charity rule changes**: Updates to which organisations can be registered as deductible gift recipients (charities you can claim tax deductions for donating to).

Official Description

Amends the: Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 and Corporate Collective Investment Vehicle Framework and Other Measures Act 2002 to facilitate the return of responsibility and resources for administering Commonwealth business registers from the Australian Taxation Office to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, in winding up the Modernising Business Registers Program; Competition and Consumer Act 2010 in relation to the regulation of safety and information standards and the penalty regime for industry codes; Housing Australia Act 2018 to increase the cap on the Housing Australia Special Account to $4 billion; and Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to update the list of deductible gift recipients. Also amends 6 Acts in the Treasury portfolio to make miscellaneous and technical amendments and 2 other Acts to make contingent amendments.

Committee Referrals

Senate Economics Legislation Committee

Full bill PDF →APH page →

Audit History

Introduced

27 Nov 2024

Last updated on APH

10 Apr 2026

Outcome date

10 Dec 2024

Last checked by Crossbench

today

Full text indexed

today

🗳️

No formal division recorded

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