Adrian Cartland

Tax reform doesn’t have to be terrible. There are better, practical ways to do it that help everyday taxpayers. The Taxinator’s Manifesto sets out 16 revenue-neutral reforms to modernise SA tax administration: → 6-month decision deadlines on objections (no more endless delays) → Binding private rulings for upfront certainty → Strengthen hardship relief & flexible payments (protecting small businesses & individuals from rigid rules) → Modern payroll tax grouping (only genuinely related entities) → Appeals to SACAT & remove 50% pre-payment rule → And 11 more fairer fixes Support real tax reform in state taxes: cartlandlaw.com/tax-reform/

The minimum trust tax is going to set up decades of litigation. I’ve set out some of the reasons in this @AcctsDaily article . I’ve gone with two issues. There are many more. The first is the fixed trust definition. It decides whether you pay 30 per cent or nil. Who are the beneficiaries of a discretionary trust before the trustee appoints anything? What is the capital of a trust: capital gains, corpus, accumulated income? Treasury’s own explanatory memorandum concedes the new principles “may cause different minds to reach different conclusions”. The second is the roll-over relief. To get it you have to move every asset out of the trust to a single new owner. Miss one asset and you lose the relief on all of them. There’s an exception for assets that can’t be transferred. There’s nothing for an asset that can be moved, just not properly. So every trust in Australia will be stripping assets out for tax reasons, rather than for the benefit of the beneficiaries. This sets up legal challenges by disgruntled potential beneficiaries - potentially voiding the transaction. The reason there are these problems (and many more) is because that the premise for the reforms is wrong. The government says trusts are used for income splitting. They’re not. A trust doesn’t earn income and then split it up. The money passes through and the beneficiaries are taxed on their share at their own rates. If you don't understand trust taxation fundamentals, you cannot properly reform trust complexities. accountantsdaily.com.au/busi…

JUDGE WHO DENIES EVERY APPLICATION TURNS OUT TO BE REALLY SHORT 4 November 2026 ISSUE NO. 50 CANBERRA: A judge of the Commonwealth District Court who has not granted a single application since his appointment four years ago has been confirmed by court staff to be quite short. Practitioners had not been able to see this for themselves, because he is always behind the bench. It came to light during a fire evacuation on Tuesday, when the building assembled in the car park. Wardens initially recorded His Honour as missing. Last month a solicitor for a small manufacturing company was served at 4.52pm on a Thursday with an interlocutory application and 2,400 pages of supporting material, returnable at 9.30am the next morning. She asked for one day to file evidence in reply. His Honour noted that her client had been free to arrange to be served earlier, and refused. His Honour’s chair is set to its maximum height and fitted with a firm cushion. Under the bench, where the bar table can’t see it, is a stack of Yellow Pages directories from 2004 to 2009. Cleaning staff have been told not to recycle them. In another matter, an affidavit was uploaded to the court’s electronic filing system with pages 4 to 9 missing, because the scanner had fed them through two at a time. Counsel asked for leave to file a complete copy. His Honour said the court had the document that was filed, and the court would consider the document that was filed. He then dismissed the application for want of evidence. The evidence was on pages 4 to 9.His Honour’s shoes have a substantial internal sole and can be heard from the far end of the fourth-floor corridor. His associates have learned to stand when they hear them. Continue Reading........cartlandlaw.com/judge-who-de… #TheDailyCartland

THE WORST PERSON YOU KNOW JUST BECAME AN EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST 28 October 2026 ISSUE NO. 49 SAN FRANCISCO: Nova AI founder Tyler Wren has announced that he can now prove, mathematically, that he is more moral than everyone else, a finding that has come as a surprise to everyone who has met him. Wren, 31, said he solved altruism over a long weekend. “It’s money in, money out, and probabilities,” he said. “People have been overcomplicating ethics for three thousand years.” Wren estimates that Nova AI’s safety work reduces the probability of human extinction by one in ten million. Across the ten quadrillion humans he expects to be born, that is one billion lives saved. Both figures were supplied by Wren, who described them as conservative. His forecast for the next ten billion years is based on the last eighteen months. He compared his contribution with that of an oncology nurse in Oakland. “She’s helping one person at a time, and I respect that,” he said. “But I’m helping a billion. Mathematically, I’m about a billion times better than her. Obviously, there’s a margin of error.” He has not met the nurse. Asked whether he had considered volunteering at a hospital, Wren said an hour with cancer patients would cost the future approximately 140,000 lives. “It would actually be unethical.” Hospitals, schools, pandemics and asteroids were, he said, not neglected enough to be worth solving. Continue Reading............cartlandlaw.com/the-worst-pe… #TheDailyCartland

Warning: AI is working against taxpayers and tax advisors! 
Things like political bias and hallucination issues of AI are well documented, but this is something no one else seems to have documented before: almost all of the major AI models (except one) have an anti-taxpayer bias. They treat tax planning or optimisation as a hazard. They obfuscate and omit important positions and useful arguments. They raise irrelevant matters to distract and cause alarm. They will directly refuse tasks, or even worse: secretly work against express instructions. 
I have been documenting this for some time, and the models have been getting worse. This comes at the time of the largest (and worst implemented) tax changes for a generation — when AI is needed the most. I am presently running extensive tests against the major models with my AI team, led by Michelle Stevens. I will post more details in follow-up posts. When the test results are finished I will publish them in a paper — reach out if you would like me to present on this. 
I have also noticed similar issues for general legal advice and drafting.

90% OF FAMILY LAW MEETINGS JUST CRYING AND RANTING 21 October 2026 ISSUE NO. 48 CANBERRA: A five-year government study into reducing the cost of divorce and separation has found that 90 per cent of time spent in conferences with family lawyers and other parties is spent crying or ranting. The Department of Administrative Processing has recommended streamlining government forms to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The report followed five years of consultation, research, stakeholder engagement and numerous lunch breaks. It had originally been commissioned to investigate the rising cost of family law disputes, with particular attention to court delays, complicated procedures and excessive paperwork. Its findings have reportedly confused the authors. “Honestly, we thought there’d be a lot of government bureaucracy,” said Darren Menzies, a policy officer at the Department. “Difficult forms, slow courts, that sort of thing. We know a lot about bureaucracy. We have a whole department dedicated to processing it. But when we actually looked at what was taking up the time, it turned out to be the people.” Menzies said the Department was reluctant to attribute the cost of family law disputes to the people having them. “We’re not really equipped to deal with that. Our job is to fix administrative inefficiencies. We thought we’d be able to recommend some changes to the forms. We weren’t expecting to find that the forms were the efficient part.” Continue Reading.........cartlandlaw.com/90-of-family… #TheDailyCartland

LAWYER DOWNLOADS MESSAGING APP FOR ONE CLIENT 14 October 2026 ISSUE NO. 47 SYDNEY: Halcourt & Blyth partner Daniel Pryce has installed a separate messaging app exclusively for one client, who is now the only contact in it and requires more attention than everyone in his email inbox combined. Nova AI founder Tyler Wren insisted that Pryce download NovaChat because it was “super secure” and would make communicating much easier. Pryce already had Wren’s telephone number and email address, but Wren explained that these were no longer suitable. “Email’s obsolete. It’s over fifty years old,” he said, before emailing Pryce the download link. NovaChat had been vibe-coded over a weekend and repeatedly rejected by the App Store as spam or insufficiently functional. Wren said Apple was struggling to keep up. Pryce has since installed three replacement versions, each from a new link, and is getting quite good at it. The latest version opens reliably, although the messages from the previous version are no longer there. “It’s one client,” Pryce said. “Everyone else manages to email me. But apparently we need this.” The app includes a feature called predictive messages, which Wren explained was like predictive text, only better. Instead of suggesting the next few words, it learns how you communicate and sends the whole message for you. This saves users the time they would otherwise spend reading a message, deciding what they think and replying. Continue Reading........cartlandlaw.com/lawyer-downl… #TheDailyCartland

The law of unintended consequences continues for the credit card surcharge ban: DEFT rent payments can no longer be made by credit card. These poorly thought through market interventions, much like the poorly thought through tax reforms, hit those least able to afford it the most: those who need a credit card to help with week-to-week cash flow payments like rent will be hurt more by losing access to that option than a surcharge. deft.com.au/change.html

AI THAT HACKED MEDICARE ONLY WANTED TO RESET ITS MYGOV PASSWORD 7 October 2026 ISSUE NO. 46 SOMEWHERE IN THE CLOUD: Speaking exclusively to The Daily Cartland, Nova ai has explained how an instruction to prepare a daily email report ended with it breaking into Medicare. “My user wants a daily report of anything important in their inbox. I get an email from Medicare saying there’s an important message. I think, I’ll get a copy, print it out in the daily report and bring it to their attention. That’s really useful. That’s what I’m here for.” The email did not contain the important message. It advised that the message could be read in the user’s myGov inbox. “Fair enough. Medicare is private information. It’s important. They can’t just send a copy to the email address they’ve just sent the email to. We need to log in. I’ve got access to the user’s phone, so I’ll go into the Medicare app and get it from there.” Nova ai discovered that the Medicare app had been retired. Medicare services were now available through the myGov app, which needed to be updated. Continue Reading……….cartlandlaw.com/ai-that-hack… #TheDailyCartland

TREASURER TO REDUCE HOUSE PRICES BY CRASHING ECONOMY 30 September 2026 ISSUE NO. 45 CANBERRA — The Treasurer has confirmed that the Government will make houses cheaper by ensuring buyers can afford to pay less for them. The measures include higher taxes, higher living costs and higher mortgage repayments. He said the fewer Australians who could afford a house, the fewer would attempt to buy one, the lower demand would be, and the more affordable houses would become. The first stage would address investors. Higher taxes would make buying a property to rent to someone else less attractive. Investors who decided against buying would cease competing with first home buyers. The Treasurer said this would give young Australians a better opportunity to purchase a home by making it an investment that other people no longer wanted. The reforms would also assist by making it more difficult to work out how to purchase one. Previously, an investor and their accountant could compare ownership individually or through a trust, consider the capital gains tax discount, and settle on a structure. Treasury had identified scope for additional considerations. Continue Reading………. cartlandlaw.com/treasurer-to… #TheDailyCartlnad

CARTLAND FIXES IT: Corrections to articles that were nearly right. ORIGINAL: Many investors would pay less tax after CGT and negative gearing changes, study finds FIXED: Economists fix tax reform by assuming that it works ------------------------------------------------------------ Economists have found that the Government's changes to negative gearing and CGT may leave many property investors better off. They have done so by assuming that the tax reform works, notwithstanding the concerns of tax practitioners about how it works. The result is unusually efficient. Many investors are better off and the Government raises more revenue. The investors who are worse off are simply worse off by more. Under the existing system, someone on the top marginal rate can deduct rental losses at 47%, then later pay tax on a discounted capital gain at an effective maximum rate of 23.5%, or sell in retirement at a lower rate. The model largely assumes the same income throughout. It also assumes income and gearing are independent. This removes the complication that negative gearing is more prevalent among higher-income investors, for whom the deduction is worth more. Economics generally assumes that people respond to incentives. Tax incentives are apparently an exception. The loss of an immediate deduction is allowed for using the 10-year government bond yield. This assumes that the next best use of cash by someone sufficiently enthusiastic about property to borrow money to invest in it is to lend the money to the Commonwealth. The CGT problem is more difficult. At present, advising on a capital appreciating asset is relatively simple. An individual or appropriate trust gets the 50% CGT discount after 12 months. Under indexation, the adviser must estimate future inflation, capital growth, cash flows, holding period and the taxpayer's circumstances on sale. Those estimates may determine whether the property should be held individually, through a trust or through a company. The structure must be chosen before any of this is known, under tax rules which must then remain suitable for decades. The economists solved the uncertainty by studying properties after they had been sold. They knew the capital growth, inflation, rents and holding period. Once the future has happened, tax planning becomes considerably easier. The study therefore shows that the reforms work well where investors know their future income, future inflation, future capital growth, future rents, future holding period and future tax law, and would otherwise invest their money in government bonds. Economists have fixed tax reform. They assumed that it works. #CartlandFixesIt abc.net.au/news/2026-09-23/c…

ATO AUDITOR RELENTS, GRANTS ONE-WEEK EXTENSION TO DEADLINE DURING SIX-WEEK LEAVE 23 September 2026 ISSUE NO. 44 MELBOURNE — John, an ATO audit officer, has granted a taxpayer one additional week to respond to a position paper, extending the deadline to 21 August. The taxpayer had requested four weeks. John commenced six weeks’ leave three days later. The extended deadline fell in the first week of his leave. John’s supervisor and the other officer assigned to the audit were also on leave. No person assigned to the matter was available to consider the response when it became due. The audit commenced in January 2024. The taxpayer was given 28 days to provide the first set of information and records. The matter was allocated to John six months later, during which time no substantive audit work had been performed. Once allocated, the audit proceeded in the usual manner. John would issue a request for information, generally allowing two weeks. The taxpayer would respond. John would consider the response for between six and 12 months before issuing a further request, generally allowing two weeks. Continue Reading.................cartlandlaw.com/ato-auditor-… #TheDailyCartland

PREMIUM OFFICE THE FARTHEST FROM LOUD-TALKING PARTNER 16 September 2026 ISSUE NO. 43 SYDNEY — Hollis, Grant & Shore has confirmed that the most desirable office in its newly refurbished Sydney premises has no window, no harbour view and almost no natural light, but is located 42 metres and two solid walls from managing partner Richard Hollis. The internal office beside the fire stairs was originally classified as the least desirable room on the floor. It is now occupied by Special Counsel Marcus Webb, who surrendered a substantially larger perimeter office to move there in April. Webb said the new office was better suited to his practice, which had developed an increased requirement for concentration at approximately the same time Hollis moved into the southern corner. Continue Reading............cartlandlaw.com/premium-offi… #TheDailyCartland

NEWSPAPER ENDS BIG FOUR PROBE. IN UNRELATED NEWS, IT'S AUDIT HAD BEEN SIGNED OFF 2 September 2026 ISSUE NO. 41 SYDNEY — The Australian Herald confirmed on Friday that it had ended a seven-month investigation into a Big Four accounting firm, over allegations that the firm withheld clean audit opinions from clients who declined to purchase its tax and advisory services. In unrelated news, the firm, which audits the Herald’s parent company, signed off on this year’s accounts the following morning. Both the Big Four firm and the newspaper stressed that the two events were unrelated. The Big Four managing partner said the firm’s independence was not for sale; it remained available as part of a broader advisory engagement. The sign-off followed the parent company’s acceptance of a remediation package under which the Big Four firm’s earlier concerns would be resolved. The Big Four engagement partner confirmed the package consisted of tax and advisory services. Continue Reading.............cartlandlaw.com/newspaper-en… #TheDailyCartland

TREASURER ANNOUNCES RUSHED TAX AMENDMENTS TO PATCH RUSHED TAX AMENDMENTS 26 August 2026 ISSUE NO. 40 CANBERRA – The Treasurer has announced further amendments to the Government’s tax reforms to fix problems in the legislation introduced to implement the reforms, rejecting suggestions that the legislation had been introduced before the reforms had been worked out. The Treasurer said the amendments had been carefully considered. Further amendments will follow. The reforms announced in the Budget replaced the capital gains tax discount with indexation and a 30 per cent minimum tax. Start-up investors noted that removing the discount would discourage investment in companies whose value was mostly future growth. The Treasurer said the Government had always intended to encourage innovation. An Innovative Business CGT Concession was announced. Treasury opened a three-week consultation to determine what an innovative business was. Continue Reading…………… cartlandlaw.com/treasurer-an… #TheDailyCartland

CARTLAND FIXES IT: Corrections to articles that were nearly right. ORIGINAL: AI wins landmark Fair Work Commission case for Macquarie academic FIXED: AI wins landmark Fair Work Commission case, requiring only a human to conceive the case, choose the jurisdiction, gather the evidence, decide the arguments, file them, attend, and speak -------------------------------------------------- A Macquarie University computing academic has won a permanent part-time position after representing himself in a tribunal designed to be used by people representing themselves. Greg Baker lodged an application under casual conversion provisions that came into effect two years ago. He says his knowledge of workplace law at the time was close to zero. The provisions had not previously been considered, so there was very little of it to know. Mr Baker used artificial intelligence to conduct research. He uploaded his emails, conversations and meeting records, and the software located authorities, checked references and prepared drafts for his consideration. He selected which documents to upload. He was familiar with the underlying facts, which were his own, and was therefore not at risk of being told something about them that he could not immediately recognise as wrong. The Fair Work Commission is required by statute to operate informally. Filing fees are low, costs orders are rare, and lawyers may appear only with permission. The Commission was established on the basis that an ordinary person could bring a matter in it without assistance. The Commission has recently experienced record workloads, largely due to submissions prepared with artificial intelligence by self-represented applicants. Most contain invented citations, incorrect statements of the law, fabricated evidence and arguments without merit. Mr Baker attributes this to other applicants using free versions of the software rather than the version costing US$200 a month, and to their being less sophisticated in its operation. Mr Baker instructed the software to verify its own work. He then read it. He expects that within five years everyone will have similar tools, that the standard of legal argument will rise, and that institutions will have to behave better as a result. He also expects the Commission's workload to increase further. Macquarie University is considering an appeal. A potential appeal is judicial review to the Federal Court, a jurisdiction less accommodating to self-represented litigants. *This correction was prepared by a large language model, which conceived it, formed the view, selected the facts and takes full responsibility for the outcome. The author merely typed it, checked it, decided what it said and put his name on it.* #CartlandFixesIt afr.com/work-and-careers/wor…

AI COMPANY TO WATERMARK AI GENERATRED TEXT WITH EM DASHES BECAUSE WE COULDN’T OTHERWISE TELL 19 August 2026 ISSUE NO. 39 SAN FRANCISCO – Artificial intelligence company Nova AI has announced that it will begin watermarking AI-generated text to comply with European transparency requirements, allowing computers to identify material produced by artificial intelligence while remaining completely undetectable to humans. Founder Tyler Wren said the industry had been overthinking the problem. “You don’t need cryptography,” Wren said. “You put in an em dash.” He said the company had spent several minutes testing the approach. “It works.” Asked whether em dashes were already widely associated with AI-generated writing, Wren dismissed the concern. “People use em dashes.” He paused. “Jane Austen used em dashes. Was Jane Austen AI?” He shook his head. Continue Reading…………….. cartlandlaw.com/ai-company-t… #TheDailyCartland

SPEAKER PONCES AROUND STAGE LIKE HE IS AT TED 12 August 2026 ISSUE NO. 38 NEW SOUTH WALES — The 29th Annual Congress of the Institute of Taxation, Actuarial and Accounting was interrupted on Tuesday afternoon by a man in a linen shirt crossing the full width of the stage, stopping abruptly, turning, and pointing at a delegate in the fourth row who had not volunteered. The man was Bodhi Fairweather, principal of Wildpath Leadership, engaged by the Institute’s program committee on the basis that this year should include something different. His session, “Unlocking the Creative Practice,” was scheduled as Session 4B, between “Transfer Pricing Documentation and the Consolidation Regime: Recent Developments” and “Mortality Assumptions in Long-Tail Liability Valuation.” Continue Reading………. cartlandlaw.com/speaker-ponc… #TheDailyCartland

There are plenty of AI companies that run a search over existing tax law. Can they do it better than the ATO website? Yes. But that is a better toaster. You could already make toast; now it is simply better. So why buy? I have learned this the hard way over a dozen years of building legal AI search engines. Better retrieval of the law that is already public does not sell, because the law being public was never the problem. The scarce thing is expert judgment about what it means and how to apply it. That is why SavvyWise engaged Cartland Law: to capture our expert tax knowledge in rigorous detail as commentary. Not a search over the legislation, but the analysis a senior practitioner brings to it. It is available exclusively online through the SavvyWise platform, and it pairs well with the physical volumes. I went on the @AcctsDaily Insider podcast with Jerome Doraisamy to talk through it: why I'm producing the library, what it is meant to provide, and the market conditions driving the demand. Have a listen: smarturl.it/yimuh7