Tax History and Philanthropy: A Tribute to John Taylor

The Productivity Commission’s philanthropy inquiry highlights that Australia’s current tax regime for philanthropic tax concessions is sorely lacking guiding principles. This is an area that calls out for tax history analysis, in the vein of John Taylor, to properly lay bare the social context of philanthropic tax concessions. Building on the Productivity Commission’s approach and previous work by Fiona Martin, this article investigates the history of donation concessions for appreciated property and of donation integrity measures as applied to refundable imputation credits.