Blog

In what has to be ‘a defining moment’ in their 100-year history, Members of Chartered Secretaries Australia have voted in favour of being rebranded the Governance Institute of Australia.

The commencement of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) in December last year saw the register of charities move from the Australian Tax Office to the new regulator immediately. All existing charities were ‘grandfathered’ into the new regulatory framework.

Back in March this year we held a Roundtable with ASX, ASIC, non-executive directors, company secretaries, general counsel and CFOs on the challenges inherent in making announcements to the market about price-sensitive information.

The passage of the legislation to establish Australia’s first NFP regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), is embroiled in party politics.

There has been a great deal of angst over the reform to the NFP regulatory framework over the past months. The version of legislation to establish the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) that was issued at the start of the year was deeply worrying, as it mixed up prescriptive detail about governance arrangements for charities and other NFPs with the statutory and enforcement powers of the new regulator.

For months, CSA has been plugging for the separation of the legislation establishing the new regulator, the ACNC, from the legislation governing the entities it regulates. It often felt that our commonsense approach was falling on deaf ears, but it did not stop us trying every method available to us to get the message through.