The Federal Government has ruled out immediately lowering the current GST threshold on goods bought online from overseas.
Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury has released the interim response to the .
He says lowering the threshold would currently not be cost-effective and would cause many problems, especially with the volume of work for Customs and Australia Post.
"Without significant investment and reform in the way in which we process parcels, there could be chaos at our borders," he said.
"To simply reduce the threshold from $1,000 to $500 would mean instead of processing 20,000 parcels a year, we would now be expecting Customs and Australia Post to process 1.23 million parcels every year.
"That would present considerable challenges to Customs and Australia Post." He says while the case might be made to lower the threshold in the future, it is too complex to do immediately.
Russell Zimmerman from the Australian Retailers Association says he welcomes news the Government will at least look at the issue.
"What they are doing is they are going to work to review the parcel processing and with the view of then looking at what the threshold should be," he said.
