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Commonwealth act
This Act has been repealed and is no longer in force. It is retained for historical reference.
This is a validation Act — a short piece of legislation with one very specific job: to retrospectively (going back in time) confirm that certain customs duties were legally collected, even though they may have been collected before the proper legal authority was fully in place.
When the Australian government wants to change the rate of customs duties (taxes on imported goods), it can act quickly by introducing Customs Tariff Proposals into the House of Representatives. These Proposals allow the government to start collecting duties at new rates almost immediately — before a full Act of Parliament has been passed. However, this creates a legal gap: the money is being collected under a Proposal, not yet under a formally enacted law.
Validation Acts like this one exist to close that gap. They retrospectively confirm that all the money collected under those Proposals was lawfully taken.
This Act covers ten separate Customs Tariff Proposals introduced into the House of Representatives on the following dates in 1973:
For all of those Proposals, any customs duties demanded or collected on or before 30 June 1974 are declared to have been .
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Direct links to the current provisions in Customs Tariff Validation Act (No. 2) 1973.
Zoe has indexed the source text for search and analysis. Use the official register for the original document and download formats.
View on official registerSourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), CC BY 4.0.
One important carve-out: Customs Tariff Proposals No. 13 (1973) is explicitly excluded — duties collected under that specific Proposal are not validated by this Act.
Without this Act, someone could potentially argue that duties collected under the Proposals (before a proper Act was passed) were unlawfully taken and demand a refund. This Act removes that legal risk entirely — the collections are treated as if they were always lawful.