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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This Act has been repealed and is no longer in force. It is retained for historical reference.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 short piece of financial legislation that authorises the Australian federal government to make one-off top-up payments to the States for the 1952–53 financial year (the year starting 1 July 1952).
At the time, the States received regular annual payments from the Commonwealth under a separate law — the States Grants (Tax Reimbursement) Act 1946–1948 — which reimbursed them for income taxes that had been centralised under Commonwealth control during World War II. This Act stepped in to guarantee that each State received at least as much as it would have if the total national pool of funding were £135 million, regardless of what the standard formula produced.
The payment to each State is calculated in two steps:
Step 1 — The base top-up: Each State gets the difference between what it would normally receive under the standard formula and what it have received if the national funding pool were £135 million. In other words, the Commonwealth is effectively guaranteeing a minimum national pool size.
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Direct links to the current provisions in States Grants (Special Financial Assistance) Act 1952.
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View on official registerSourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), CC BY 4.0.
Step 2 — A further safety net: If a State's share under Step 1 would be proportionally smaller than its share under a similar top-up payment made the previous year (under the States Grants (Special Financial Assistance) Act (No. 2) 1951), the State gets an additional amount to bring it back in line. This prevents any State from going backwards compared to the previous year's arrangement.
This Act reflects a critical feature of Australian federalism: the States depend heavily on Commonwealth grants to fund hospitals, schools, roads, and other services, especially after the Commonwealth took over income tax collection in 1942. Acts like this one were the mechanism by which the federal government topped up State finances when the standard formula didn't deliver enough. It is a small but important piece of the post-war financial relationship between Canberra and the States.