Okay. I think we should get started. We've got a big group in the room. So, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to my colleagues who are in the U.S. For those of you who do not know me, I'm Heather Hamilton, the Executive Director of Asia Pacific. Joining me today is CASE President and CEO, Sue Cunningham, who is based in Washington, D.C. You probably have to give everybody a wave, Sue, and others. Mandy McFarlane, CEO for Educate Plus. Brian Flahaven, CASE Vice President, Strategic Partnerships and Advocacy, and incoming and interim Executive Director for Asia Pacific and CASE Vice President for Data Research and Technology, Cara Giacomini. We also have a guest speaker today, Anne Robinson, partner at Prolegious. Please note that this session will be recorded or is being recorded. Also, we'd like to ask that you keep your microphones muted. We will have at least 20 minutes for Q&A towards the end, so please hold questions until then or put them in the chat, and we'll try and address them all. There's a lot of people here today, so we'll do what we can. I will now hand over to Sue and Mandy to welcome everyone. Thank you very much, Heather, and thanks, everyone, so much for joining us at relatively short notice. Obviously, we're here today to talk about the first draft report that came from the Productivity Commission last week. We, working together with our partners at Educate Plus, and Mandy, it's wonderful to partner you in this webinar, felt it was critically important, whilst the response is due in February, that we convene now, as this is an issue that is obviously very much on everybody's minds. For those who may not be familiar with CASE, CASE is a global membership association. We have about 3,100 schools, colleges, and universities in 80 countries around the world who are members of CASE. When we're looking at issues of what's happening in the school sector, obviously, what happens in one part of the world has ripple effects in many parts of the world, so thinking about the implications of what's happening in Life Productivity Commission, I think is critically important and hearing from you all today and over the coming weeks, I think it's going to be vital in putting together our response. CASE is guided by our strategic intent, which is about defining competencies and standards for the profession of advancement and leading and championing that dissemination across the world's educational institutions. Our goal is to help all of you advance your schools so that you can do the remarkable work that you do do to transform lives and societies. One way we do this is by representing our members in front of governments and convening members for conversations such as the one today. When the Productivity Commission announced its philanthropy inquiry last year, we were eager to share our expertise and recommendations based on our experience with schools in Australia and our knowledge of what has worked in other parts of the world, both in the secondary and in the tertiary sector. We engaged several key volunteers in Australia and I know some of them are on this call, so thank you very much for your advice and input so far. As we pulled together our formal comments of the Commission, comments that included a recommendation that the Commission recommend that schools get automatic DGR status. Well, unfortunately, as we know, the Commission's interim report included a recommendation that went in the opposite direction, recommending that DGR status for building funds is withdrawn. If you've not already done so, please do take a moment to read our statement on the Commission's recommendation. My colleagues will post a link to the statement in the chat. Thank you very much for doing that, colleagues. So first and foremost, we're eager to spend some time with you today providing background on the Commission, its recommendations, and what you can do to help them reconsider the recommendation. We're also, of course, critically interested in hearing from all of you. Seeking your feedback on how the recommendations would impact your schools. And we'll also, of course, be asking you to weigh in with Commission by the 9th of February. As you consider your response, please know that KCCI support you and answer your questions. I'm incredibly grateful for the leadership of Heather Hamilton, our current Executive Director for Asia Pacific, and Cara Giacomini, our soon to be interim Executive Director for Asia Pacific, and will include information on how you can reach out to both at the end of the webinar. And with that, I'd like to thank you again for joining us. I'd like to thank Mandy enormously for joining us and for her partnership. And I think, Heather, at this stage, I'm handing over to Mandy. Yes, thank you. Thanks so much, Sue. And I absolutely reflect a lot of what Sue said. I'd like to acknowledge all the Educate Plus members on this call. Many of you had input into the submission we initially made, and I thank you so much for that. I'd also like to thank our fundraising partners who shared their industry experience with us and helped us to craft our submissions in a way that reflected our whole industry. It's been really important to collaborate on this issue. It's not often we get the opportunity to advocate in a way that we are at the moment, and we need to seize that opportunity. So I'd really like to thank CASE for partnering with us and for hosting today, AHISA, AIS, and the Federation of PNCs of public schools. And thank you, Paul Dennett, for your response there. It's been wonderful. We were so delighted that the Australian government really wanted to shine a light on philanthropy and the work that the Productivity Commission was doing and is doing is important work, and it's going to have a massive impact on fundraising in the future. We're really disappointed with the DGR recommendation, but they've given us the opportunity to respond. It's a respectful conversation, and we have got together quite a lot of evidence and data in order to persuade them that this is not a good recommendation and will have the opposite effect of what they're trying to achieve, which is increased giving and philanthropy in Australia. So I thank you so much for making the time today to discuss things with us. We need to hear from you so that we can craft a submission that is powerful and reflects our whole industry. And as you said, we're also going to ask you to do the same thing. I think volume counts in this instance, and your schools and your voices are very, very important. So we're going to step through how we can do that. And yeah, just thank you for joining us today and allowing us to have this conversation. Fantastic. Thank you, Mandy. I think we'll move over to Brian to provide, initially, you and Brian, again, to provide a bit of an overview on the Productivity Commission recommendations and proposals. Great. Thanks, Heather. And can everybody see my screen? I just want to make sure you can see the presentation. Great. Excellent. Well, I just want to say, again, thanks to everybody for joining this evening, this evening where I'm at, but also during the day. We wanted to walk through some background about what the product, a little bit of background about the Productivity Commission, a little about what exactly was said in the interim report, and just share a little bit of background around some of the things that we included in our statement of case, and of course, the Educate Plus included in their statement as well, and share a little about what the recommendations said as well. So let me walk through some of that very quickly. Just for those of you who don't know, the Productivity Commission is an independent research agency that provides advice to the Australian government. It is independent, and it focuses a great deal and emphasizes a lot of its independence on its independence, but it is funded by the Australian government. So it really does act at the behest of the government, but in an independent fashion. So as you can see, the government determines its work program, determines what the Productivity Commission is going to focus on. And there's really as part of the process, and they can have a number of inquiries going on at one point, and they have a number of them going on right now. But as part of that, part of any inquiry or any work that they do, there's a strong commitment to public engagement and feedback. So when we talk about the comments that both Educate Plus and Case submitted, that was part of a pretty extensive and long, and I'll share the timeline in a minute, process of seeking feedback from the community and from different stakeholders in the community. As I said, they have a number of public inquiries that are going on at one point. The one obviously we're focused on and we've been really engaged with is the Philanthropy Inquiry. And as the commission states on its website and a number of the documents, the real focus of the inquiry is to analyze the motivations and identify opportunities to grow philanthropy further in Australia. And really there's a particular focus on the government's goal of achieving, of doubling philanthropy by the year 2030. So that's just a little bit of background about the Productivity Commission. There are three commissioners who have been particularly focused on the inquiry and drafting the interim report. Just to give you a sense of the key dates and kind of where we're at, the IPRI has been around for a while. It was launched earlier this year in February. When we were talking about the comments, we'll share a little bit more about those that both Educate Plus and Case submitted. We did that earlier this year. There was a deadline of 5th of May when those submissions closed and were due. And then we were waiting anxiously and anticipating the draft report, which came out on the 30th of November, and are now in a period of, first of all, reviewing, reading the draft report. And now, as I said, the Productivity Commission puts a lot of emphasis on seeking comments and feedback. So we are right now working on and thinking about what our formal response and our recommendations back to the commission based on the interim report will be. Those are due on the 9th of February. And we'll talk a little bit about how you can play a role in weighing in for that important deadline when those final submissions are due. After that point, there will be public hearings and some additional roundtable discussions that will be convened by the Productivity Commission. And I believe, and, Mandy, you can correct me wrong, I think the 19th February hearing is the one that's in Perth, if I remember correctly. But they are across Australia. And we can share as a follow-up to this the different dates of those hearings, because that could be another way, in addition to potentially submitting comments, that you could go and engage and share your viewpoints with the Productivity Commission directly at these public hearings. And then, of course, there's a final report to the government that will come out on the 11th of May. And that report is just a report and recommendations from the Commission. They will likely incorporate the comments that they received between now and February 9th. They'll agree with some. They'll disagree with some. They'll include the rationale behind the recommendations and then submit that report to government. One thing that I want to mention, I mentioned that there were a lot of comments and interest in this inquiry. There were roughly, I believe, 270 different comments that were submitted, formal recommendations that were submitted during the first period, that February 11th to May 5th period. So a lot of organizations and individuals weighed in. And that's in addition to just 70 folks who just commented directly to the Commission. So when I say they really are looking for public feedback, they really are trying to engage and seek public feedback. So a really important part of message of tonight is we really need to make sure that they hear the voice of schools as they consider their final recommendations. Let me turn it to Mandy, who can talk a little bit about that initial submission that Educate Plus did in that first period. Mandy, do you want to share a little bit about that? Sure. Thanks, Brian. So first and foremost, our submission and all the recommendations that went with it actually can be found on our website on the About Us section. And I think it's been posted in the chat as well. But in fundamental principles, we had three major recommendations. The first was to grow capacity. We all know in our institutions how difficult it is to find fundraising, skilled fundraising people and how critical they are to our institutions. So we had a couple of proposals on how we could potentially grow that capacity. It was the people who actually do the fundraising. We needed to grow that. The second thing was to change giving attitudes. We really, it is changing in Australia. It's taking a long time, but it is changing. And we felt that if we could bring that earlier and get young people on board to establish a culture of philanthropy at a very early age, that's going to help in the long term. It's not necessarily going to help for 2030, but it's something we want to do for the long term. So that was the second recommendation. And the third very, very important one is exactly what Sue was talking about earlier. It was broadening DGR status to do a sort of whole of school status that any project that you are running and need funding for can actually attract tax deduction. As we've seen, many of our schools are doing wellbeing programs. They're doing a number of very interesting learning programs, innovation programs. All of these are not currently, they don't have DGR status. So we wanted to try and broaden that. So this is the bit that was really a surprise to us that the recommendation from the Productivity Commission was so polar opposite to what we'd actually suggested. So I'm not going to go through all our recommendations. I really urge you to read them and you can see what we actually did put forward. But in summary, those are the three main recommendations that we made from EducatePlus perspective. Thanks, Mandy. And I'll just say, because a lot of what we put in our comments from CASE echoed a lot of what you said as well in the EducatePlus comments. And I should also mention, as Sue mentioned at the outset, that in addition to schools, we represent colleges and universities as well. So part of our comments obviously speak to that portion of the education sector. But in particular, we emphasize similar to what EducatePlus recommended, building fundraising capacity for schools, the ability, the staffing that we need in order to do the fundraising, to bring those skills and that training to schools and those additional skills and attract more talent to fundraising generally. We also focused on an experience that we had learned and we had seen be successful in another part of the world, particularly in the UK, and focused a lot on a matched funding scheme that was done a little over a decade ago now in the UK that focused where the government was very involved in helping to spur both training of fundraisers, but also matching gifts to higher ed and universities in the UK as a way to help leverage and to bring and build philanthropy at those schools. And we actually just released a report kind of reflecting on that, in part, reflects on some of the growth that has happened in philanthropy in the UK based on that matched funding program. So we really wanted to encourage the Productivity Commission to really look at that model and to think about a matched funding program that would be similarly set up for schools in Australia. And that, as Mandy said, really in the one that is probably most critical for our discussion, I really focused on liberalizing fundraising rules for schools and foundations, really focusing on receiving automatic DGR status, liberalizing the fundraising rules around schools. So as we said earlier, we were unfortunately surprised by the Commission's decision to go in the opposite direction, particularly when it comes to school building funds. And I just want to shortly just go through, and I shared a couple of quotes up here on this slide, because I just want you to get a sense of where the Commission is coming from, the perspective of the Commission, and why in a report where the focus is on working to double philanthropy in Australia, the Commission would consider withdrawing DGR status from school building funds. And if you read, there's particular sections of the interim report that focus on this, but I just share a couple of the quotes that are from this, just to give you a sense of what the concerns of the Commissioners were. So really, the concern about the fact that they really focused on this for primary and secondary schools, converting a tax deductible donation into a private benefit is a substantial risk for schools. And the reason they said that was really related to that bullet number two, that they viewed the potential donors to schools, so that students, I should say students, parents, alumni, would benefit directly from those donations. And they really kind of drew a through line to the fact that they felt that by making those donations, essentially, that would be a private benefit to those donors. But also, because schools charge fees, that by virtue of the donations, that would reduce the fees. So there would be, again, another private benefit to those who are attending the school. They tried to draw a strict line between the two. And they've focused on, in particular, school building funds, and that's where they're withdrawing it. They did leave open the door, I think, pretty substantially to funds that are focused on scholarships, but they were very, very specific in saying that those funds need to have an equity objective. So there needs to be the scholarship funds that are set up have to be focused on equity, and those would continue to have DGR status under their recommendations. So it really, for them, was a focus on the fact that they felt that using a rubric that they developed in the report, that they felt donors to schools were getting a private benefit for those donations. And as you can see from our statement in the conversation, we disagree with that interpretation, and we'll talk a little bit more why. The other, just a couple of key points I want to make is they referenced a little bit of the history of DGR status around school building funds, saying that at one point, it did feel like it was necessary back when it was started in the 1950s or so. But now the need for that has lessened over time, as there's been more government support for primary and secondary schools. So they viewed the fact that there's been more government funding as a reason for, less of a reason to have the tax-deductible status for schools and building funds. So that was one key piece. And they also focused a lot on making sure that any donations provide net community benefit, and that was a really big focus. And they just were not, it was clear from their interpretation and what they put in their report, were not convinced that there were net community benefits from those donations to schools. So I just want to point out where the rationale and the thinking, and we can talk more about that when we get to questions, but that's really the recommendation from the commission that we're really focused on tonight, and the one that we're most concerned about. With that, I'm going to stop sharing the screen, and I'll turn it back over to Heather, who will introduce our guest. Great. Thanks, Brian and Mandy. I'm just going to hand over to Anne Robinson from Prolegious, who will provide us with a legal perspective. Thanks, Heather. And thanks, Brian, for an excellent summary of some of the background and the content of the draft report in the Productivity Commission. So I don't need to go through any of that stuff, and I can assume that you're fairly familiar with the DGR context. For those of you who don't know me, Prolegious is a specialist charity law firm. We just act for charities, not-for-profits and people doing philanthropy, and we're the largest practice group in the country that just does this stuff. We act for hundreds of schools across the country and have for many years. Anyway, that's us. I was also on the Tax Concession Working Group and Deputy Chair of the Not-for-Profit Sector Reform Council. So when the Labor government was in, worked very closely with them on the reform package. And as far as, I guess, those of us on that, especially the Tax Concession Working Group, even though we've had ongoing discussions with Treasury and the ATO since, it's really unfinished business. Our recommendations were never implemented. And so what the brief to the Productivity Commission was to add some important information from their perspectives. And you have to remember, and I agree totally with Brian's summary of this, but you have to keep in mind the Productivity Commission's remit, and it'll say this as often as you want to listen to them, their job is to come up with principle-based and data-based recommendations. So that's their remit. And they actually, I've had a lot, I've had a number of meetings with them. I've had some private consultations with them when they're putting together the draft. And I have been speaking regularly with Christian Seibert, who's been very much involved in this. Christian was David Bradbury's staffer back in the day when they were putting this stuff together originally. Anyway, that's background. But I don't think, so the Productivity Commission doesn't see its job to actually implement the government's policy of doubling philanthropy, which might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but that is their position. So it's important to put in further submissions. It doesn't mean necessarily that the government will accept whatever is in the final report. So it's important to keep that in mind. It's an informing thing. And the intel that I've received just recently is Andrew Lee has no intention of actually implementing this removal of school building funds. So that's, but you never let that sit. You've got to do the work and it's terrific that you guys are really engaged in this process. So just very briefly, I was asked to sort of give a bit of background. I mean, I presume that you're all across this, but as you, I can assume you know, schools, giving to schools is not deductible in itself, but you have a number of key object opportunities. School building funds is a big one, has become bigger and bigger as time has gone on. But scholarships and bursaries to an extent is a big one. For some areas of the sectors, particularly those doing, looking after Indigenous education or disability education, they can be public benevolent institutions and they're deductible as a whole for all of what they're doing. So that's a piece. It's not as big as the school building funds, obviously. And public library is another category. So a lot of the schools, we help them set up public libraries and that means you can give to all the operations of a public library, including all the IT stuff and the people and it's not just for the building. So there are actually a number of options available. So it's not just about school building funds. But would I say, would, the important question, would the removal of school building funds increase giving? I think it's very important to counter that suggestion in the draft report and I'm sure you will in your submissions. There's no evidence, there's no evidence at all that if you don't give say to a school building fund, you'll give it to something else. That's not the way this works. So that we have to counter that one. Is it abused? There's no evidence that really that school building funds are abused. However, I will have to say that it is true that in some sectors of the private school world, some schools have well-heeled, well-off schools have kept their, in the past, have kept their fees low and then have muscled their parent body into giving more significant donations. And the unwritten message has been, we have to be, we have to be realistic about this. The unwritten message has been, if you don't give to the school building fund, we'll have to increase fees. Now the government knows about this, this is, but, and so the other lever that we have to keep in mind, and to this point, I think Brian, I think it's fair to say that the school building funds were introduced back in the fifties to, at a time where there was not this massive uplift in school funding. So I think it's fair to see it in the context of the whole school funding package. And it's actually that school funding package has been used to moderate the behaviour of some of those schools, which I won't name, who kept their fees low. And they have been required effectively, forced to increase their fees to a more even level. So we have to be realistic about these levers. I think if we can't just look at the school building fund equation and the government sees it and treasury sees it as a cost to revenue, because it's a cost to revenue of the donation given the tax deduction. So we have to be realistic about that. But we also should be realistic in a context where a significant amount of government money goes through to fund private education. I believe it should, don't get me wrong. I'm not justifying that, but we have to always be careful that we don't just sound entitled on one side of that equation. And I've been doing this stuff for far too long. I know there are very creative ways that parent bodies use and foundation members use and come up with all sorts of schemes over the years to try and make their school fees deductible. So we need to be also, I'm not suggesting you put this in a submission, but we need to be realistic about that, that that actually has been one of the features of this space. So that's about the abuse. Will the government agree to this? As I said, my understanding is that Andrew Lee doesn't really have any political appetite to accept this, but that shouldn't change our behaviour at this point. We still need to stay involved. So we should need to make submissions. The private benefit point, really good point to raise that, Brian, that is a problem that there is private, the argument about private benefit. I really don't believe there is evidence that the way people give to the various DGR options in schools, but particularly school building funds, the timeline does not work to suggest that people give to that and then get a private benefit. It just doesn't work that way. If you're alumni, the people, if you've got kids in private school, and I remember well, but mine have left now, you don't have the money to put in money, unless you're extremely wealthy, but most people are struggling to pay the fees. And that doesn't become a factor, you'll put in money to school building funds until after you've left. So it's really an alumni and some of the parent body proposition. And the timeline is such that the children in the school at the time will not get the benefit of buildings that are in the pipeline. So it just doesn't, other than the other private benefit point I raised, which I think is a shrinking feature of the independent schools funding model. I don't think that's a reasonable argument. So will they agree to it? I don't think so. Will they agree to extend DGR to all categories of charity? I've advocated for that for years, but it's not going to happen. There's always been this carve out of primary and secondary education and institutions purely for the advancement of religion. However, I also have been advocating for what we call a DGR aggregator, that if you're going to say everything else should be DGR, it's only fair that those two particular categories of institutions have access to what we've called sort of commonly in the trade, these DGR aggregators, that schools could have a general fund and use it for all the categories of DGR. Now, what's really interesting, if you've been following the most recent parliamentary sittings, there's a bill that's still, it's just about finished going through the parliamentary process. It's sitting in the Senate at second reading stage, that community foundations. Now, you might have sort of read over this and thought that's not relevant. Actually, it is likely to be relevant once we see how Treasury drafts the guidelines attached to this. This is a community foundation that a community, like a school, could operate for all those categories of DGR, and it would simplify the whole giving proposition for institutions hugely. So, that's this, watch this space one. We're not quite sure what the detail will be, but we know Treasury, because I've been in discussions with them for months now. They're very keen to have this other sort of entity available for not just the, what we call the community foundations, but others that are with a capital C, others that are maybe community foundations with a lower case. Anyway, that's probably enough for me, but I do, I would encourage you to keep making submissions. I'm not a fan of, this is probably a bigger conversation, I'm not a fan at all, and the sector is not in favour of the UK gift aid model for a number of reasons which I won't go into now. But it's just, if you've talked to, we talk to our colleagues in the UK all the time, the charity law nerds around the world, and nobody likes that model, particularly the people in the UK. So, they'd much prefer, we actually, it is better what we've got at the moment, even though it's not as far reaching. Anyway, I've had my time, so maybe if you've got anything else we can raise it in questions, but thanks for your time. Could I just jump in? Thank you, go ahead. Anne, would you mind just talking a little bit about the differences between DGR through funds in a foundation opposed to a school? Is there any difference? I just want to clarify that point. Sure. So, foundation is not a technical word. It usually means an associated entity or sometimes an entity, not a legal entity, but a name of an activity, which is like you guys deal with all the time of raising funds for schools. So, it's not a technical term. It sometimes can be set up as a separate legal entity. And sometimes what that looks like is it's a company that's the trustee of a public ancillary fund. And a public ancillary fund is a DGR 2. It cannot use the money directly. It has to give it to a DGR 1. So, a number of schools do have these separate foundations. I'm not a fan. I think they're a bit, they've been not particularly helpful for schools. And it's not necessary, but you can still have a thing called a foundation that does all the fundraising. But they essentially, if you're talking about a public ancillary fund, you can give it a tax receipt, tax deductible receipt for giving to a DGR 2, but you cannot use that money. It has to go to a DGR 1. So, that typically, for those, some of the older schools that have got these sort of foundation structure this way, they will then give to a school building fund operated typically by the school, better by the school. Public library has to be operated by the school. It can't be operated by a foundation. Scholarships and bursaries could be operated by either. And sometimes foundations sitting outside do operate the scholarships and bursaries. But it covers a multitude of things. We typically would set them up these days as a committee within the school governance structure. And that means that you don't lose control of it. You keep it within the family and within the control. Great. Thanks, Anne. Thanks so much. Wonderful. Thank you, Anne. There's a lot of great information and food for thought there. So, what we'd like to do now is to take some questions from the floor of either Brian and Mandy. And if you're asking a question, please turn your camera on. Introduce yourself and let us know where you're from. You have to put your hand up and we'll try and monitor or put the question in the chat and we'll try and answer from there as well. I also see, Paul Dennett, you've made a comment. Do you want to raise that? So, I don't want to read it out to everyone so they can see it. So, go ahead and please, if there's any questions. Thank you, Eva. Just really my point there being that even if we are accepting that there is this unwritten, unspoken agreement with some parents in some schools, the idea that we would bring in legislation that impacts across the entirety of the approximately 10,000 schools in Australia, including all of our public schools, our government schools, just seems a sledgehammer to crack and what I think is possibly an imagined nut. And I'm not sure that it's registered at all with those making the recommendations just how profound an impact that could have on our government schools, which despite any claims about significant investment in schools and education since the 50s, we, many of us are feeling in the public sector that we need to know an awful lot more and philanthropy has been something we're increasingly looking towards as our way forwards. Great, thank you, Paul. We've got a question from Ahisa. Chris, I'm a CR of Ahisa in Canberra. Firstly, I'd say the fundamental proposition that independent schools don't produce any public good or public bad that need to be very strongly contested. And I think that's the crux of the argument to suggest that this DDR status should be removed. I think that needs to be defended very strongly. The second point, a couple of comments that Anne made, she'd like to comment and it's referred to in the Productivity Commission review about the significant increase in support to independent schools since the 50s. What we need to stress is that that support, government support for independent schools is recurrent support. It hasn't been support for capital development because recurrent funding can't be used for capital development. And we know that the capital funding that's been available from state and Commonwealth governments, it's been fairly limited and it's been basically directed at low fee, much more so the low fee schools and the so-called high fee schools have never really had access to that capital development anyway. That's a really important point, I think, that that significant increase in funding for independent schools has been all about recurrent funding and not that which can't be used for capital development. The other point I'd like to dispute with Anne is that this abuse question that schools have been doing deals to hold their fees down and therefore increase more bribe giving. I'm not sure what the evidence for that is. If you look around at the moment, there is no evidence that schools are keeping their fees down. They're trying to address the cost of increasing teacher salaries, which are highly significant to their cost base. And in my experience of running an independent school, being an educator at an independent school for more than 20 years, I haven't seen any evidence of the fact of schools doing these deals. And in fact, in New South Wales, you'd be potentially breached, but not the proper legislation to be doing a deal like that, that would be providing some subsidised support to encourage bribe giving. So this abuse question is referred to in the Productivity Commission report. I did a story with The Guardian on Monday. They know about this very issue, and I again disputed it very strongly. The other thing I think in support of retaining our DG arts types is that independent schools continue to need to develop capable facilities because of the increasing demand for independent schools. Most independent schools are growing, and some of those schools grow enormously. When I ran a school in New South Wales for 10 years, up until 2014, it had 1,000 students. That school's got 800 students. So there's a phenomenal growth. So schools need access to this DG arts types just to provide basic tertiary facilities and brightest in the sector. But as I said, I'm not sure you want to respond, but I'm not sure of the abuse question at all, and I haven't seen any evidence. And I'd be interested from any old research who are in the webinar to perhaps comment on that. Thank you. Could I respond to that, Heather? I don't know how to say it. Sorry, Sue. Beg your pardon? Sue just wanted to flag that Kate Barnett's hand is up, so after you, Anne. Yep, yep, sure. I'll just briefly, look, I'm not saying I agree with it. I have actually, though, seen evidence with some schools that it did happen in the past. I think that's all I'd want to say about it. I think it's a practice which is diminishing, but that doesn't mean that I agree with the proposition for all the reasons that you've mentioned at all. I'm just saying that you need to understand when you're advocating what's running through the minds of people. The Productivity Commission has put this in their report. There are things that have actually prompted them to say that. They, therefore, need to be countered. And that's really what I'm making of it. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Totally agree. Absolutely. We must make these submissions for that reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So where's the evidence for this strict legislation around the stakes about ... Well, absolutely. It's in breach of the non-profit requirement. We know that. All I'm saying is that that practice was known to happen. So we just ... I don't think we should have our heads in the sand about that, that that's what's fed these sort of ... That's my question, that's all. Yeah, that's fine. I'm in violent agreement. I'm in violent agreement, don't I? Sure. Okay. Thank you. Can I hand over to Kate Barnett with her next question, please? Thank you. Sure. Anne, I found your insights incredibly reassuring, actually, and particularly when you gave us a little insight into maybe what's in Andrew Lee's mind as to his intention not necessarily to implement this recommendation, but as you said, that shouldn't change our behavior. What I was really interested to understand is whether ... So both CASE and Educate Plus were in unanimous agreement that schools should be eligible for DTTR status generally, but was that addressed or counted in any way in the product tip? You said that they did the opposite, but did they give any sort of reasons why not? And why not other things like teacher excellence or other wellbeing issues, as maybe was alluded to? Yeah, sorry, others maybe. Yeah. I'll just say from my read of it, and then Anne, you may have read the same things or seen something else as well. They did allude to it very generally, but not in a very deep way, I would say. They essentially made a statement about ... A very general statement that there was a lot of requests to expand DTR status to other charitable activities, but they really didn't see the rationale behind those. And if you start from the premise for schools, in particular, that they felt at the start that there was that private benefit question, once you go that route and you feel that that's a real vulnerability for schools, that pretty much closes the door on them expanding DTR status if that's where they start. So they didn't really get to that besides saying generally that they didn't see a rationale for expanding DTR status to other charitable activities that haven't been counted in the past. Now, they did talk about expanding to other types of charitable organizations, but they didn't get into that much specifics. But I don't know, Anne, if there's anything I missed that you maybe caught that I didn't. Can we move on to Nick Jaffer if he's got a question? Sure. Mandy, did you want to have a quick word on that? I wanted to add something to what Chris said, and maybe, Kate, this answers some of your question as well. The Productivity Commission hosted a webinar just after the report was released, and people who had made submissions were invited to attend. So I attended and Paul Bennett also attended. And I posed a question, it wasn't this type of Q&A, you could only do it on the chat, posed a question asking if they could please supply the evidence and data on which they'd used to make this recommendation. They didn't answer my question, directly didn't answer my question. Paul then re-asked the question again, and they gave a very light, they skirted around the edges. There was no provision of, yes, here's the block of evidence. And yet, during the webinar, they'd been really clear on making the point that everything in this report was based on evidence and data. So we'll be pursuing that a little bit more, because I think if we can understand what they've, like Anne has said, what their thinking is and what they've based it on, we might be able to counter in a more specific way. But there didn't seem to be any evidence and data. And Paul could be this out, there was a real discomfort around having this conversation by the commissioners on the webinar. So I think there's uncertainty, and this is my perspective completely that they are going to get this over the line. I think they know they're treading into really, really turbulent waters and not quite sure how to proceed. So I think we've got a real opportunity, as I've said before. So I don't know if that's helpful in any way, but just backs onto what you've been saying. I think I just build on what you're saying from a number of conversations I've had in recent days. I think Anne's point, inevitably, many of the commissioners are parents who themselves sent children to private and independent schools. And I think that the part of it is precisely what Anne was describing as the conflation of bills where both fees and donations are seen as coupled. And clearly the commissioners perspective is this is an abuse of taxation, which is not the intention, all that you've and Anne and others have said, that the impact of philanthropy is critically important. None of the indicators about derived benefit and so on are accurate. But I think thinking ahead, we would be wise to be cognizant about thinking about how that is perceived and how we might reflect on that in the future. I think that's going to be a really important piece, as is, I think, the extent to which those buildings are made more broadly accessible to community. And I think that's an area which would, and hoping that this does not come to be, but that anticipating future recommendations about this in years to come, and therefore thinking about how we prepare as a whole in order to be much stronger in terms of pushing back over time. Thank you, Sue. Over to Nick, and then we've got Tim Shearer. So we're starting to get tight for time now, so we can keep the questions tight. Thanks, Heather. Listen, this is a question both for Case and Educate Plus. It strikes me that one of the things that probably needs to get addressed going forward is how we leverage, or leverage is probably the wrong word, but how we bring together low SES schools and their participation in response to this. Because if one of the critical things going forward, or one of the criticisms of the Productivity Commission is that effectively the wealthy schools are getting wealthier, and those that are benefiting are lowering their fees going in, certainly one of the beneficiaries out of this going forward are going to be low SES schools who actually need new facilities, and in fact, need new buildings, and need new opportunities to develop those schools. Is there anything being done to bring together those schools that come from low SES backgrounds? It's a good question, Nick, and I guess Paul Dennett is certainly coming from that perspective, and Paul, maybe you want to jump in here, but if we're going to be growing certainly public schools in terms of philanthropy and public schools, that's exactly what you're talking about. But the low SES comes back to our evidence and our data, and we'll talk about that a little bit in the next section, how we gather that information so that we can actually make a statistical response based on fact rather than perception. Thanks for the question, Nick. I'm just going to park it for a while because I don't have the exact answer, to be honest with you. We'd have to do some research ourselves around that. I think also the more that we can coordinate in terms of the response in February across the school sector as a whole, the better. There was a question in the chat earlier about, can we provide key bullet points or phrases to be used in letters? Of course, we'll be really happy to do that over the coming weeks and let you know when that's available. Thank you, Mandy. Tim, share. Thanks, Heather. Look, I'm pretty sure that there'd be universal agreement that the proposal and the recommendation is counterintuitive to the stated goal of the commission, which is to double philanthropy. I was heartened to hear that view that I actually strongly suspect from my experience that a number of people who we work hard to encourage to make philanthropic commitments to this educational institution, it's not coming from anywhere else often. I think it's a decision that they make and I think that's an area that we need to defend rigorously. I just think it just flies in the face of what they're trying to achieve. So I think it's like a massive own goal is the way I look at it on their behalf. But having said that, it should take nothing for granted. So I'm just more interested in terms of the submissions that we make, is it best that the submissions are managed by the bodies, the terrific bodies have done a great job, but it seems like the bodies, their views have been pretty much ignored in terms of the recommendations that were made. Is it best that we again use the bodies to make submissions or is it best that we overwhelm them by numbers and everyone in each individual school makes their own submission? I would like to get some view on the strategy moving forward about how we deal with this. We've got till the 9th of February, there's a lot of closing down for school holidays. I'm just going to give an example of what we've done here at Scotch. We've called an emergency meeting of our school council fundraising committee for tomorrow afternoon. I previously put it after this meeting to feed in some of the information to them, to inform them as best I can, because I do feel this is an existential sort of threat to independent schools. Tim, I would thought inundation is the right approach. I don't think they can hear from too many voices and if the voices are giving a consistent message, and of course, as has been indicated by Mandy and Case, we'll be submitting submissions. As Brian mentioned, there were well over 200 submissions to the initial invitation. I wouldn't hold back. It's probably how we coordinate that best in terms of messaging. It's got to be unique to our own. We can't just come and post a statement and send it through. I don't think that's going to work, but I think it needs to be, if the bodies could have some role and with volunteers happy to help, we're all here to help. How we coordinate the response by the 9th of February. Thank you, Tim. I just wanted to say that our next agenda item, our final agenda item is about next steps. We'll go through what the next steps are and what our suggestions are. I'll hand over to Mandy and Cara to provide that information. Yeah, great. Tim, you were absolutely spot on. We need to have a coordinated response and we feel the collective volume is going to be important here. Exactly what Sue was saying. What we also needed to gather some evidence and data. We thought we would do a couple of things and these are suggestions. Please jump in if anybody disagrees. We thought the first thing we should do and Case and Educate will compile a very short survey to send to everybody that was on this webinar and anybody that you want to send it on to, just to gather some basic information. What building projects have you completed in the last five years? What is down the pipeline in the next five years? What percentage of your donors support a building fund? An estimate of how many of them are driven and incentivized by the tax deduction. Then very importantly, is this conversation around community use and impact because that's a very powerful tool to show that the private gain is not the community gain and it's something that will counter the report. There might be other questions. We're going to flesh that out. These were just some of them that we've been talking about in the last couple of days and really based on the feedback we've received from all our members. That will go out pretty soon. I would say before closure end of this year. It gives everybody genuine to get it back to us. There's no privacy stuff there. We don't need actual how much you raise. It's really just to gather information of what the impact could potentially be should this DGR status be withdrawn. That we will do straight away. We really do need every single school's personal individual response. What we're going to do just to make it a little bit easier is just give everybody a guide on what, as you say, what sort of common language can be used. What are we trying to achieve? Keeping the tone really respectful because at this point they've asked us for feedback. We've got this opportunity to give it and we're very happy to do that. How to submit your responses, what the links are, all that kind of stuff. There are two ways at the moment. There is the submission, which is due by the 9th of February. Then there's a sort of a very shortened chat option that you could actually go onto the site and you could just put in, I think it's 200 words maximum. You could choose both or either. Then as CASE and Educate Plus, we will do overall sort of umbrella submissions, trying to encapsulate everything that we've all spoken about. We will consult. Anything, any points that you have, please send them through and the contacts are both there. You know, for CASE, Akora is the contact. I'm the contact for Educate Plus. So just anything that you feel should be in the submission, send it through. I've already got an extremely long list from my interactions with everybody over the last sort of 10 days. It's to formulate a powerfully well-written response. Anne, I would love to call on you as well just to give us some legal context in which to frame our recommendations moving forward. And that was in a nutshell, which we discussed and Kira, I'm sorry, I've probably gone too far down the slide, but please jump in if there's anything. Absolutely no problem, Mandy. We're all looking at this in very similar ways and thank you. What we're really looking to do here is realizing that data is really the main piece that's driving a lot of the goals of the commission is to look at having more robust data in our responses. So asking some very basic questions, we'll be working together to do that and to get that out to you in a way that we can aggregate some of those responses to be able to say what the impact would be of making this type of change in a language that really has been the language of the report, I would say, except for in this section where there's been very little data provided. So that's one of the ways that we're looking to move forward here and they'll be hearing from us to do that. And as Mandy said, just looking at having a template with some similar types of statements, ways of approaching this so that people can put in additional comments to the commissions, but also we're speaking in a unified voice across the sector. And that's why CASE and Educate Plus are working so closely together on this because this affects all schools and the work that we're doing collectively. It's okay. Well, thank you, Cara. And thank you, Mandy. I'm going to hand over to Sue now and then Mandy for closing. Thank you very much. And really, I just wanted to add, it's very helpful to have that clear and concise plans following up. Many voices in the chat have talked about can we be coordinated in our approach and what we've set out will create the opportunity to do that. I know this is a busy time and we're about to break for the holiday season, but thank you all, as Mandy was describing, for responding to that survey. I think the data is going to be critically important. Really grateful to Anne for joining us. I think your input was invaluable and grateful to all of you for your thoughtful engagement with this and for your continued feedback or things that occur to you after the session, please do reach out. The session, as you noticed, is being recorded and the recording and slides will be circulated to everyone for access following on from the meeting. But we're very good to see you all looking forward to working together and working together with our partners at Educate Plus. And Mandy, can I hand over to you to close us out? Yes, I can. Thank you so much. Thanks, Sue and the whole CASE team. It's been wonderful to work with. So yes, we've got this important opportunity and let's just make the most of it. I'm pretty convinced that we can persuade the Commission that they need to rethink their position on this, but we'll do that with evidence and data. Tim, you've got a last question. Sorry, Mandy, just before everyone goes, I've got a couple of points. Well done, I think, to Educate Plus and CASE for coming together on this initiative. I think that's a terrific move. I really want to congratulate and thank everyone for being part of that. I think we all, there's a small sample size here, we all need to reach out to our other contacts at other schools who aren't on this particular Zoom session. I think that's a responsibility we all must undertake. I also think, just thinking of the data that I believe is useful in this instance is while I'm tracking our donations to our scholarship fund, pre-DGR status being granted, if someone can tell me what year it was for independent school scholarship, DGR tax-deductible donations for scholarships rolled out for independent schools, I know they're always there for units, but we're tracking donations before and after to show that significant impact that it would have. And I just wanted to, I'll just share this with you, and we've got a fun to end up with, is that I can remember meeting with a donor. He asked me to see him and I met with him and I described all the different funds that he could support. And I said, we have an Indigenous scholarship fund, a boarding scholarship, et cetera, et cetera, a building fund, an archive museum fund, which one would you like to support? And his response to me was the tax-deductible one. So it's pretty, and I think the spirit of philanthropy is alive and well, but it clearly is a strong motivation for many of our people, myself included. Yeah. I'll take your point completely, Tim, and I know we will work together, but as please spread, as Tim said, spread the word. And there were many more people actually registered on the webinar today, so they will get the recording because they couldn't be here in person. So I think, again, the year is not necessarily in our favour. Educate Plus and CASE will keep working through the holiday period to get all of this done and moved along as quickly as we can. But we need your input. We need your help. We need your voice. We need your advocacy. So because this is our industry at the end of the day and it's going to make a massive impact on our institutions and that's what we're here to help with. So thank you everybody. It was lovely to see you. Happy holidays for those of you who are having holidays and yeah, good festive season. Thank you. Cheerio all.

webinar

Productivity Commission

DGR status

school building funds

recommendations

philanthropy

low socio-economic schools

unified response

education sector

Deductible Gift Recipient

recommendation

impact on schools

data gathering

advocacy

formal responses

unity