A decision several years ago not to include GST as part of its business registration has created a major problem for a small community committee’s attempts to recover from October’s floods.
The committee that manages the Mooroopna and M.G. O’Brien halls, which sit alongside each other in McLennan St, Mooroopna, says it has been refused a grant to help repair the buildings because the committee did not register for GST when it was registered for an ABN.
“The grants that we would like to apply for would require us to be registered for GST, and when we were first registered for an ABN back in 1999 the people who did that didn't register us for GST,” Mooroopna and M.G. O’Brien halls Committee of Management treasurer Christine Parnell said.
“As a result, because we’re not registered for GST, we’re not eligible for a lot of the grants that are out there, and trying to get GST registration is, at the moment, not happening, we’re not able to do it. The ATO doesn’t want to talk to us.”
An emotional Mrs Parnell said an early estimate of the cost of repairing the halls was around $100,000 and she wondered how the small committee could raise such an amount without being able to access grants.
“I was devastated because there’s all this money out there and we can’t access any of it,” she said.
“We’re just a little committee ... Sorry ... We’ve put our heart and soul into this and it’s for the community and it belongs to the community.”
The buildings are owned by the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, which Mrs Parnell said was trying to help the committee find a solution.
“They don’t insure their properties against events like this because they’ve got hundreds and thousands of properties — you can imagine what we, the taxpayers, would be paying for insurance,” she said.
“So they deal with disasters as they happen and they’re trying to help us secure some funding, but we’ve come up against a really big hurdle. At this stage, I’ll call it a hurdle rather than a roadblock.”
Mrs Parnell said adding to its troubles is the Australian Taxation Office telling the committee only its founders can alter the registration to include GST — and those founding members are believed to have passed away.
“The wheels of government roll very slowly,” she said.
“The people at DELWP are so stretched at the moment because hundreds of their properties are going through similar things to what we’re going through with the flooding over the state.
“So I understand, and plus, of course, the election didn’t help because we were put into caretaker mode right when we needed their help the most, early on.”
A number of community groups use the hall for a broad range of activities, including line dancing, martial arts, puppetry, parties, weddings and funerals, and they have either sought accommodation elsewhere or postponed their events until the halls are repaired.
So in the immediate term, with grants out of reach, the committee is hoping to raise funds from the community in an attempt to start work on the halls.
“It’s going to be a good six months before (they open again), and that’s if all the funding falls into place,” she said.
“If we don’t get funding the halls may never open again because we cannot open them the way they are. We can’t hire them the way they are.”