Landcare Tax Facts for Primary Producers
In partnership with The Basalt to Bay Landcare Network between 2015 and 2018 the ATO has produced four Australian Primary Producers tax fact sheets. 1: Shelterbelts. 2. Landcare and other Expenses 3. Farm forestry & agroforestry 4. Fire preparedness. They are a unique example of a small Landcare regional organisation seeing an engagement problem, reaching out to a large fiscal entity to help solve the problem, and as a result achieving a series of fact sheets that had never been created before.
These fact sheets were written to overcome a huge issue of lack of tax knowledge in primary producers that are considering undertaking land degradation reversal, waterways protection, improving their fire preparation, and increasing their climate resilience. The lack of knowledge of what they can legitimately claim in the Landcare tax stream prevents greater uptake of these tax incentives and prevents many primary producers from effectively addressing natural capital risk. The fact sheets are an action stimulus – giving primary producers the confidence to take action, knowing which of those actions can be claimed against business tax and how to account for them.
The fact sheets were developed as a multi-faceted multi-use series of tools to promote to primary producers in Australia ways they can use tax and tax offsets to implement actions which reduce their climate vulnerability, protect natural capital and agricultural resilience/competitiveness, prevent species loss by providing corridors across private land between public land assets, increase habitat for native species, support greater investment in controlling and eradication of invasive species on private agricultural land, increase primary producer tools to support greater environmental custodianship balanced with strengthening the economic capacity of the landholder over time.
