How are low-value imports assessed in Australia?

Why

• The tax base includes the international freight, not only the item. That matters more on this lane than on most, because the freight band this desk records for a sub-two-kilogram parcel into Australia is among the highest in the matrix, so an inexpensive item sent by express can carry a taxable value well above its price. Reducing the carriage tier changes the assessment as well as the carriage cost.
• Duty and tax are separate questions here. The duty band modelled for apparel and footwear into Australia is low, while the goods and services tax sits at the published national rate, so most low-value parcels produce a tax line and no duty line at all. Assuming that one implies the other is the common arithmetic error on this lane, and it makes the bill look wrong when it is not. Most parcels on this lane therefore arrive with one line rather than two, and a bill showing only tax is the expected shape rather than an error or a missing charge. Reading it as incomplete is what sends buyers looking for a problem that does not exist, when the two lines are separate by design.
• Where tax was collected at the point of sale the shipment should carry a record of it, and your own order page is the fastest proof. A demand at the door on a sale that already included the tax is a duplicate, and a carrier can act on the order record when it is shown before payment rather than after the money has changed hands and the parcel has been released.
• Below the duty threshold the assessment rests on the declaration, which brings the same documentary discipline as any other lane. A listing snapshot, the payment record and the seller's written description, kept together from the day of purchase, are what make a challenge possible at all later. The figures here come from public sources and are planning inputs rather than tax advice. Questions about a named shipment belong with the assessment office or a licensed adviser, because only those two can see the declaration and the entry that produced the charge. A general model of the two lines is useful for planning and useless as a defence of a specific entry, and treating the second as the first wastes the window in which a query can still be raised. That window is short, because a charge has to be questioned while the parcel is still held or very recently delivered, and the office that raised it answers on documents rather than on a description of what you expected. Prepare the file before the parcel lands, not after the bill does.

When this answer flips

• The order page shows tax collected at the point of sale, because a demand at the door then becomes a duplicate rather than a new charge and can be answered with that record.
• The consignment value sits above the low-value band, because duty then joins the tax line and the calculation changes in kind as well as in size.
• The seller ships the order as several parcels, because each one is assessed separately and each attracts its own carrier charge, lifting the total above the single-parcel case.

Three things to do next

1. Estimate the Australian duty and GST band
2. Build the full landed cost
3. Read what a low declaration triggers