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And then our third object is the red tape reduction one, it's to promote the reduction
of unnecessary regulatory obligations on the sector and I'm going to go into a little bit of detail here
partly because the government has made it such a high priority.
I know it's been a high priority of the Victorian government as well, and when you look at the various political
parties around Australia, it's a pretty consistent policy commitment
that the level of bureaucracy be reduced. So the sort of things that we're doing:
once this object was introduced into the Act, we reorganised our staff
so we've got a Directorate that's dedicated to reporting and to red-tape reduction.
We chair a whole-of-government working party that's been set up to reduce
regulatory duplication in Not-for-profits, and we chair that with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
We do have a representative from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet here today.
We, with others, have worked on data standardisation.
In other words, those of you working in the finance area would know that there's a National Standard Chart of Accounts
for the Not-for-profits sector, that COAG committed to adopting across Australia.
Part of the work we've done, (is) we've funded work to align that to a similar piece of work
that the Commonwealth government did to get standardisation of financial data
in the commercial sector primarily, but more broadly, and that was called Standard Business Reporting.
So the National Standard Chart of Accounts and the Standard Business Reporting
are now aligned, the two data dictionaries are either the same or speak to one another,
but I think importantly, the SBR has a software product and a platform that enables
very rapid data transfer, and so it is the basis on which we're able to make good some of our promise
of red tape reduction. So to illustrate how we do that (referring to slide)
is the next dot point - the charity passport- and this actually will happen within government.
You won't see much of it but we've done an exercise across the Commonwealth government and then
consulted with the States and Territories, where we asked the departments:
"What is the core information you require from charities Not-for-profits when you're procuring services
through them or you're distributing grants to them?"
And it's remarkably similar, not surprisingly, they're all pretty much asking for the same information.
So we have got all that information agreed as the core. We can electronically corral that,
and we can make that available certainly across the Commonwealth and in fact,
because of the Commonwealth government's commitment to 'report once, use often', it's required in the Commonwealth
but we're making it available to the States and Territories as well.
So what that means, and it's of particular relevance to those of you who have lots of grant applications
(is) once your details are with us, so we have your legal name or your ABN and we do have that if you've
passed over from the ATO or if you're a new charity, all of the information that's
in that passport is there for other departments and they're not allowed to ask for it again.
The Commonwealth, in a minute I'll come to this, well I may as well move to it as we speak..
The second dot point (referring to slide), the Commonwealth have re-written their grants administration guidelines
and that forbids Commonwealth departments to ask (you) for information that the ACNC has.
We'll get the information through registration and through updates that come through an
Annual Information Statement which I'll explain in a moment. So particularly I think,
for those of you who are in involved in, and somewhat reliant on grants, that'll be a tremendous saving in time.
In addition to that and this is the first dot point, we're establishing, we think it's going to be 25 in the end,
working groups that are going to look to streamlining reporting across the Commonwealth.
We're starting with non-government schools and the Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations
is the relevant department.
But in addition, the two, if you like, Industry Bodies, the Independence Schools Councillor of Australia
and the National Catholic Education Commission are involved, as well as the
national body that collects information on student performance, and there's some financial reporting information
that's provided to Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.
All those people will come together in a small working group, with an emphasis on working together,
we will put on the table the legislation under which they operate their current obligations to government
and that's pretty much in relation to an annual financial statement
and the requirements that students participate in annual assessments.
We would then compare that to what the requirements are for the ACNC and they are not surprisingly far fewer.
We'll make sure there's no duplication and we'll use it as the opportunity
to try and get further reduction of unnecessary administrative requirements and then we'll indeed need to move that
to a State and Territory level but we're starting with the Commonwealth
but you can appreciate - aged care providers, hospital, employment providers - there's a host
of charitable enterprises out there where we've got to get these groups going.
We have, to help us with these exercises, we have secondees from AusAid - for overseas development,
DEEWR, that's the Department of Education and Workplace Relations
have dedicated staff to working in this area.
FaHCSIA, that's Family Housing Community Services and Indigenous Affairs have given us a secondee.
So we've got a pretty high level of commitment across the Commonwealth but you probably appreciate it's
just hard yakka. You've just got to get in there and make it happen.
So in a similar way we're working with other regulators, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission
is a very important one because some of you would be Companies Limited by Guarantee
and the way that the ACNC (Act) has been written,
is that once we were established, certain powers would be turned off in the ASIC Act.
So in the future, Companies Limited by Guarantee that are charities will be registered with ASIC,
they'll be bound up with ASIC, but all of the regulatory oversight
will be done by the ACNC. In other words, they'll relate to and report to the ACNC
and the ACNC will provide any information to ASIC that it wants.
So we're in the middle of discussions with them, developing an MOU for what data exchange will occur
and of course some of you would appreciate some challenges in getting the two IT systems to talk to one another
to make that happen easily. In addition we are involved in similar discussions
with the Office of the Register of Indigenous Corporations, so doing much the same work.
Now collaborating with the States and Territories, you can appreciate there's only a certain number
of hours in the day and the approach that the Commonwealth took (was) to really
get its own house in order and then to work with the States and Territories. Having said that,
there is a lot happening, under the auspices of the Council of the Australian Governments
which is the meeting of the Prime Minister with the first ministers, the Premiers
in the States and Territories, There's a not-for-profit working group and there's a lot of work
happening in that working group to achieve simplification and to harmonise particularly
say, for example, fundraising laws across Australia because many of you operate
in more than one jurisdiction but in addition to that, we're working on a one-to-one basis
with the States and Territories to see if we can get a far higher level of alignment.
To date, South Australia have agreed to close a full regulatory and reporting alignment with the ACNC.
(That) means charities that operate in South Australia, if they're registered with the ACNC
they won't have to register with the state regulator for fundraising.
We will handle that for them. They're going through a process at the moment of modifying
their act and they are putting it out for consultation within the next few weeks
with a view to that being ready to being implemented on the 1st of July this year.
We are in discussion with two other jurisdictions and we've had recent discussions
with a third where there might simply be reporting alignment where that state might make, or modify
its reporting requirements so that they satisfy the ACNC requirements so that people only report once.
So they're the kind of discussions underway and we are taking it one at a time,
it takes time but we're feeling fairly optimistic about the potential for progress there.