Aussie Import Duty/Tax for Librem 15 - FYI (Australia)

Just letting other Australians know that the import duty/tax payment that was required by me personally (I live in QLD, near Brisbane) for my Librem 15 Laptop was a hard $356 AUD (!!!). Here I was thinking I could wing it, guessing it would be low. Be prepared to pay through the nose to have one of these babies delivered. Thankfully Purism offers free international shipping!

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i’m not in that part of the world but it’s good to know how much OTHER users are paying for this luxury kit :slight_smile:

Is that GST or other taxes?

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My L15v4 costed me additional 14,613 Russian rubles for import, which was approximately 238 USD at the time of paying.

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Thanks for letting us know.

how much ? just it without import taxes …

1,806 USD, AFAIR.

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i’m curious if the L5 will be lower than a 100 $ a piece when you get it. it’s already a very high sum but they might get greedy if they see more than one piece being delivered at a time. might be safer to bring them in one at a time…

Considering our current taxation rules, this is going to be $64 (but I ordered L5 for reduced price of $649 before Aug '19). However, the rules will get worse next year, so I believe that Purism is going to deliver Evergreen this year :wink:

G’day Scarlett,

I’m in Perth Western Australia. Thanks for the info. I’m interested in purchasing the L5 mobile. Do you or anyone else on here have any idea how long they would take to send it out if I ordered one now? It says six months?

They will ship only pre-orders during 2020, next year, when all pre-orders will be shipped, new orders will be shipped in two weeks.
If you pre-order now, you’ll wait for six months.

that shouldn’t be too hard. we’re getting used to it. it seems we’re doing a LOT of waiting these days …:mask:

Thanks for the reply. I ordered one, I just hope I receive it considering all the bs going on atm.

Would it be illegal if you had it delivered to a friend in a country where the tax is lower, or zero, and have them ship the “gift” to you? I don’t want to incite criminal activity, but I wonder if there is a law against it. Probably is, but never heard of one.

I wanted to order 6 clamps for water-cooled system. Total price $6.00 - shipping $95.00!!! Via the USA so I ordered them from China. It took 3 weeks and was cheaper. I think it came to about 12.85 AUD.

Too, are you not able to use the $356 AUD as a tax write off?

You’ve raised my eyebrows on this as I have been preparing to buy Librem/PureOS, once it’s ironed itself out of the major issues. I’ll research my import duties so I don’t have any surprises. Thanks for the heads-up.

~s~

@dean
Hi Dean,

Here’s a bit of info I got from using the virtual assistant on the Aus. government website www.ato.gov.au (super helpful site for so many things, btw):

"When you import goods into Australia there may be GST payable.

If the goods are valued at more than $1,000 then Customs will collect the GST at the border.

If the goods are valued at less than $1,000, then GST will be collected by the seller."

My total was over $1,000 so customs collected the GST upon arrival in Australia.
Hope this info. helped.

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@Sharon
Hi Sharon,

Not too sure about the illegal sense when it comes to the your creative thought process but my guess is that it probably wouldn’t be, or at least no one could necessarily prove that you were “tax dodging”, since you could have simply sent the “gift” to your friend, they didn’t like it so forwarded it to you, for example.

I’m not sure what it would mean when it arrives on our shores though, since I only paid the import duty/tax when it got here and it was in regards to how much the item was worth (being over the threshold of $1,000).

Maybe call the ATO or go on their website (ato.gov.au) and you might get the right information.

Good idea about the tax write off. I’ll explore that option further, particularly since it is half for business use. Thanks for the idea.

And definitely a good idea about researching your import duty costs. A simple import duty calculator is easy to find through a simple web engine search.

P.S. Using the laptop now it was worth the extra $356 AUD surprise :slight_smile:

@Douglas
Hey mate,

To stay up to date for each batch update, here’s a link:

If you ordered one now you’d most likely be in batch Evergreen (as they say in this post: https://wp.puri.sm/posts/librem-5-batch-faq/ ) which is estimated to start shipping mid August, though you may still have to wait a bit due to the fact they’d start shipping those who’ve pre-ordered before you.

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@reC

Both my partner and I have a Librem 15. Since I got my laptop first I calculated whether or not it would have been cheaper to import both at the same time but it didn’t turn out to be so in my case. Whether they were imported separately or not, both items had to pay the same tax due to both individually being worth over $1,000 AUD so the tax amounted to same whether shipped separately or not. That’s Aus for ya. Maybe if the goods were below that $1,000 threshold it would have been another story.

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@reC
Haha, yeah. Lucky us.

@zero
No worries. Definitely worth the shout out to help others avoid the surprise I got, ha.

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