{"id":"C1936A00004","name":"Apple and Pear Bounty Act 1936","slug":"apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936","collection":"act","jurisdiction":"commonwealth","status":"repealed","isInForce":false,"actNumber":"4 of 1936","makingDate":null,"administeringDepartment":null,"currentVersion":{"id":3774,"registerId":"commonwealth-C1936A00004-current","compilationNumber":null,"startDate":"2026-03-30","status":"Repealed","reasons":null,"registeredAt":null},"sections":[{"sectionNumber":"1","sectionType":"section","heading":"Apple and Pear Bounty Act 1936","content":"APPLE AND PEAR BOUNTY.\n\nNo. 4 of 1936.\n\nAn Act to provide for the Payment of a Bounty on the Export of Apples and Pears from the Commonwealth.\n\n\\[Assented to 20th March, 1936.\\]\n\nPreamble.\n\nBE it enacted by the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate, and the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia, for the purpose of appropriating the grant originated in the House of Representatives, as follows:—\n\nShort title.\n\n1. This Act may be cited as the Apple and Pear Bounty Act 1936.\n\n  \nDefinitions.\n\n2. In this Act, unless the contrary intention appears—\n\n“apples and pears” means fresh apples and pears;\n\n“bushel case” means—\n\n(a) in relation to apples, a case of the dimensions of either the Australian bushel case or the Standard bushel case as specified in the Commerce (General Exports) Regulations as amended to the date of the commencement of this Act; and\n\n(b) in relation to pears, a case of the dimensions of any case specified in those Regulations in respect of pears.\n\nFor the purposes of this definition—\n\n(a) two cases of the dimensions of either the Australian half-bushel case or the Standard half-bushel case, as specified in those Regulations, shall be deemed to constitute a bushel case in respect of apples; and\n\n(b) three trays of any dimensions specified in those Regulations shall be deemed to constitute a bushel case in respect of pears.\n\n“Commerce (General Exports) Regulations” means the Commerce (General Exports) Regulations being Statutory Rules 1926, No. 22,\n\nAppropriation.\n\n3. There shall be payable out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund, which is hereby appropriated accordingly, the bounty specified in this Act.\n\nSpecification of bounty.\n\n4. The bounty under this Act shall be payable in respect of apples and pears exported from the Commonwealth during the year ended the thirty-first day of December, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-five, in respect of which the Commerce (General Exports) Regulations, as amended to the date of the export of the apples or pears, were complied with.\n\nRate of bounty.\n\n5. The rate of bounty payable under this Act shall be Four pence per bushel case of apples or pears.\n\nTo whom bounty payable.\n\n6.—(1.) Bounty shall be payable in the prescribed manner to the grower of the apples or pears.\n\n(2.) The amount of bounty payable to a grower shall be calculated on the quantity of apples and pears certified by the prescribed authority to have been exported by or on behalf of the grower.\n\nCondition of bounty.\n\n7. A payment of bounty shall not be made under this Act unless the claimant for that bounty has, on or before the thirtieth day of June, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-six, lodged an application therefor with the Secretary of the Department of Commerce of the Commonwealth, or, in the event of an arrangement being made under section eleven of this Act in relation to any State, with the prescribed officer of that State.\n\nOffences against Act.\n\n8. No person shall—\n\n(a) obtain any bounty which is not payable;\n\n(b) obtain payment of any bounty by means of any false or misleading statement; or\n\n  \n\n(c) present to any officer or other person doing duty in relation to this Act or the regulations made thereunder any document, or make to any such officer or person any statement, which is false in any particular.\n\nPenalty: Five hundred pounds, or imprisonment for two years.\n\nPower to call for information.\n\n9.—(1.) The Minister, or any person thereto authorized in writing by the Minister or by or under any arrangement made in pursuance of section eleven of this Act, may by notice in writing call upon any person to furnish to him, within such time as is specified in the notice, such books and documents and such information as the Minister or that authorized person thinks necessary in relation to compliance with this Act or the regulations made thereunder or any suspected contravention thereof.\n\n(2.) Any person who, without reasonable excuse (proof whereof shall lie upon him), fails, after receipt of a notice under the last preceding sub-section, to comply with the requirements of the notice, shall be guilty of an offence.\n\nPenalty: Five hundred pounds, or imprisonment for two years.\n\n(3.) Where the person who has so failed to furnish the books, documents or information is a claimant for bounty, payment of any bounty payable to the claimant may be withheld until he has furnished the required books, documents or information.\n\nReturn to be lain before Parliament.\n\n10. A report upon the working of this Act, and a return setting forth—\n\n(a) the amount of bounty paid under this Act; and\n\n(b) such other particulars as are prescribed,\n\nshall be prepared in the month of September, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-six and shall be laid before each House of the Parliament by the Minister within fifteen sitting days of that House after the thirtieth day of September, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-six.\n\nArrangements for payments of bounty by States.\n\n11. The Governor-General may arrange with the Governor in Council of any State for the payment by the State on behalf of the Commonwealth of bounty under this Act to growers of apples or pears in that State, and for the carrying out, by officers of the State or other persons, of any powers or functions under this Act.\n\nRegulations.\n\n12. The Governor-General may make regulations, not inconsistent with this Act, prescribing all matters which by this Act are required or permitted to be prescribed, or which are necessary or convenient to be prescribed, for carrying out or giving effect to this Act, and in particular—\n\n(a) for prescribing penalties not exceeding Fifty pounds or imprisonment for a period not exceeding three months for any breach of the regulations; and\n\n(b) for conferring upon any officer or authority of the Commonwealth, or, in any case where there is an arrangement under the last preceding section with the Governor in Council of any State, upon any officer or authority of that State, any power or function incidental to the carrying out of this Act.","sortOrder":0}],"analysis":{"summary":{"complexity_score":2,"scope_assessment":{"changed":false,"description":"The Act is entirely consistent with its original stated purpose: a one-off bounty payment to apple and pear growers for the 1935 export season. There is no evidence of scope creep — the legislation is tightly confined to a single commodity, a single completed calendar year, and a single payment mechanism. It does not purport to establish an ongoing scheme or expand into related areas."},"complexity_factors":["Very short Act — only 12 sections","Limited defined terms (only 3 definitions: 'apples and pears', 'bushel case', and 'Commerce (General Exports) Regulations')","The 'bushel case' definition has minor nested logic (half-bushel cases and trays deemed equivalent), adding a small layer of complexity","Narrow, single-purpose scope with no broad policy discretion","Minimal cross-referencing — mainly internal references to other sections of the same Act and one external regulation","No conditional logic chains or exceptions to exceptions","Fixed rate, fixed time period, fixed deadline — very little interpretive work required"],"plain_english_summary":"## Apple and Pear Bounty Act 1936\n\n**What this law does in a nutshell:**\nThis Act provides a one-time government payment (a \"bounty\" — essentially a cash subsidy) to Australian apple and pear growers who exported their fresh fruit during the calendar year 1935. It is a narrow, time-limited piece of legislation designed to put money back in the pockets of fruit exporters for a single, already-completed export season.\n\n---\n\n**Who it affects:**\n- **Apple and pear growers** who exported fresh fruit from Australia during the year ending 31 December 1935, and who complied with the Commonwealth's export regulations at the time.\n- **State governments**, which could be brought in to help administer payments on the Commonwealth's behalf.\n\n---\n\n**Key details of the scheme:**\n\n- **How much?** The bounty is paid at a flat rate of **fourpence (4d) per bushel case** of apples or pears exported. A \"bushel case\" is a specific standard-sized packing box defined by Commonwealth export regulations.\n- **Who gets paid?** The **grower** of the fruit — not a middleman, exporter, or packer — receives the bounty. The amount is calculated based on how much fruit a certified authority confirms was exported by or on behalf of that grower.\n- **Deadline to claim:** Growers had to lodge their application by **30 June 1936** with the Department of Commerce (or a relevant State officer if a State arrangement was in place). Miss the deadline, miss the money.\n- **Funding source:** The money comes out of the **Consolidated Revenue Fund** (the Commonwealth's central pool of public money), which this Act formally appropriates (i.e., authorises to be spent) for this purpose.\n\n---\n\n**Rules and safeguards:**\n\n- It is an offence (punishable by up to £500 fine or 2 years' imprisonment) to fraudulently claim bounty, make false statements, or present misleading documents.\n- The government can demand books, records, and information from claimants. Refusing to comply without a good reason is also a criminal offence — and can result in your bounty being withheld until you do comply.\n- A report on how the Act was administered, including total bounty paid, had to be tabled before both Houses of Parliament by a set date in 1936.\n\n---\n\n**Why it matters (historically):**\nThe 1930s were the height of the Great Depression. Australian apple and pear growers, who relied heavily on export markets (particularly the United Kingdom), were under severe financial pressure. This bounty was a targeted government lifeline for one export season, reflecting the Commonwealth's use of production and export bounties as an economic tool during that era."},"issue_detection":{"absurdities":[{"type":"retroactive_impossibility","section":"Section 4","severity":"high","reasoning":"Section 4 limits bounty eligibility to apples and pears exported 'during the year ended the thirty-first day of December, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-five.' The Act received royal assent on 20 March 1936, meaning the entire period of eligible exports concluded nearly three months before the Act came into force. No grower could prospectively comply with an Act that didn't exist during the operative export period. The Act is entirely retrospective in its operative effect, which while not legally impossible (retrospective legislation is valid in Australia), means the statute was obsolete at the moment of its birth — no future exports could ever attract the bounty.","confidence":0.98,"description":"The Act, assented to on 20 March 1936, purports to pay a bounty on exports that occurred during the year ended 31 December 1935 — a period entirely in the past before the Act even existed."},{"type":"retroactive_impossibility","section":"Section 4","severity":"medium","reasoning":"The condition of bounty is that the Regulations were 'complied with' at the time of export. Because the Act had not yet been passed at that time, exporters in 1935 could not have known they needed to comply with the Regulations for the purpose of this Act, nor could they have taken any corrective action if they hadn't complied. The compliance condition is effectively unverifiable as a prospective obligation and can only be assessed forensically after the fact.","confidence":0.85,"description":"Section 4 requires compliance with the Commerce (General Exports) Regulations 'as amended to the date of the export' — but exports occurred in 1935 under whichever version of the Regulations then applied, and exporters had no means of retroactively ensuring compliance with a compliance condition introduced in 1936."},{"type":"other","section":"Section 2 — definition of 'bushel case' (pears)","severity":"medium","reasoning":"The definition cross-references the Commerce (General Exports) Regulations (SR 1926 No. 22) for tray dimensions applicable to pears. If those historical Regulations did not specify pear tray dimensions, then no tray can satisfy the definition and the entire pear-tray pathway to constituting a 'bushel case' collapses. The Act provides no fallback. Given the Regulations are locked to a 1926 instrument, there is a real risk the specified dimensions either never existed or are no longer practically verifiable.","confidence":0.65,"description":"The definition of 'bushel case' for pears deems three trays of 'any dimensions specified in those Regulations' to constitute a bushel case, yet the Regulations are frozen at Statutory Rules 1926, No. 22 — if those Regulations specify no tray dimensions for pears, the deeming provision is a nullity."},{"type":"impossible_compliance","section":"Section 7","severity":"medium","reasoning":"Section 6 requires bounty to be paid in the 'prescribed manner' to a 'prescribed authority,' and Section 7 requires lodgement by 30 June 1936. The prescribing mechanism is Section 12 (regulations). If the Governor-General had not made the necessary regulations before 30 June 1936, claimants would have no 'prescribed manner' in which to lodge and no 'prescribed authority' to lodge with (absent a State arrangement under s.11). The deadline could therefore expire before the administrative machinery was operational, making timely compliance impossible.","confidence":0.75,"description":"Claimants must lodge applications by 30 June 1936, but the Act was only assented to on 20 March 1936, leaving a window of just over three months — and crucially, the 'prescribed manner' and 'prescribed authority' required to make a valid claim depend on Regulations that the Governor-General had not yet made."},{"type":"other","section":"Section 10","severity":"low","reasoning":"The provision requires the report to be prepared during September 1936, then tabled within 15 sitting days after 30 September 1936. This is workable but self-limiting: the report must be prepared before the tabling trigger date. If Parliament was not sitting in October-November 1936, the 15 sitting day count would extend, but the report itself would have been sitting idle since September. More notably, this is a one-time reporting obligation that, like the Act itself, is entirely temporally bounded and automatically became spent.","confidence":0.7,"description":"The report is to be 'prepared in the month of September, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-six' but must be tabled within fifteen sitting days 'after the thirtieth day of September, One thousand nine hundred and thirty-six' — meaning it must be both prepared in September and tabled after September, creating an absurd one-month shelf life for preparation followed by immediate obsolescence if Parliament is not sitting."}],"contradictions":[{"severity":"medium","section_a":"Section 2 — definition of 'bushel case' (apples)","section_b":"Section 2 — definition of 'bushel case' (pears)","confidence":0.8,"description":"The 'bushel case' definition for apples fixes dimensions by reference to the Commerce (General Exports) Regulations 'as amended to the date of the commencement of this Act' (i.e., frozen at March 1936), whereas Section 4 requires compliance with those same Regulations 'as amended to the date of the export' (i.e., as they stood in 1935). The applicable version of the Regulations for definitional purposes and for compliance purposes is therefore different, potentially producing different case dimensions depending on which version is used."},{"severity":"low","section_a":"Section 6(1)","section_b":"Section 11","confidence":0.7,"description":"Section 6(1) states bounty shall be payable 'in the prescribed manner to the grower,' implying a Commonwealth-prescribed process. Section 11 allows the Governor-General to arrange for States to make payments on behalf of the Commonwealth, effectively delegating the payment mechanism to State officers under State arrangements. A grower in a State with such an arrangement receives bounty under a State-administered scheme rather than in the 'prescribed manner' under Commonwealth regulations, creating two parallel and potentially inconsistent payment regimes without a clear hierarchy."},{"severity":"medium","section_a":"Section 7","section_b":"Section 9(3)","confidence":0.75,"description":"Section 7 imposes an absolute deadline of 30 June 1936 for lodging a bounty claim, with no exceptions. Section 9(3) allows payment to be 'withheld' where a claimant fails to furnish required information, implying payment may be suspended and then resumed once the information is provided — but if compliance with s.9 notices takes the claimant past 30 June 1936 (e.g., if the notice is issued close to the deadline), the claimant may be caught between the withholding power and the claim deadline, with no provision allowing the deadline to be extended."}]}},"importantCases":[],"_links":{"self":"/api/acts/apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936","history":"/api/acts/apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936/history","analysis":"/api/acts/apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936/analysis","conflicts":"/api/acts/apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936/conflicts","importantCases":"/api/acts/apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936/important-cases","documents":"/api/acts/apple-and-pear-bounty-act-1936/documents"}}