Good news on charities – mostly

When the Gillard government created the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), it was a mixed blessing. On one hand, it imposed brand new red tape on small charities that never had to report to bureaucrats before. On the other hand, it was poised to gather brand new data on a sector that had never been surveyed in a systematic way.

That data has now been gathered in a report that, for the first time ever, gives an overall picture of Australia’s not-for-profit sector. Some of the more interesting findings:

• The combined income of all charities was $103 billion in 2014.
• Nearly half of all charities (44%) have no paid staff.
• A third of charities (38%) are more than twenty years old.
• More than 85% of charities operate within one state only.
• Half of charities had income less than $146,000.

The charities commission has been trumpeting that top-line figure, $103 billion, in order to underline their claim that the not-for-profit sector has become too big to be left unsupervised by Canberra. But if the NFP sector has grown big in some ways, it has remained small in others.

Nearly half of all charities are entirely volunteer-run, and six out of seven operate in just one state. Regulation that would be a mere nuisance to WorldVision can be crippling to small charities, so the fact that they make up such a large share of the charity sector should make bureaucrats and politicians think twice before they add further red tape.

The only distressing finding in the report is that two out of five large charities receive more than half of their funds from government. This is not entirely unexpected in a sector that includes schools, medical facilities, and social services-but it is something to keep an eye on.

Thankfully, those of us who believe that independence from the state is the heart of civil society can take comfort in the fact that six out of ten registered charities receive no money from the government whatsoever-and that includes the CIS!