I have no idea how Sanitarium thought what they were doing was ok and that they would get away with it after the supermarket investigation by comcom and the cost of living crisis being the biggest election issue.
Ffs. Strip them of their charity status already
I’m not against this. Why haven’t any party’s picked this up as a policy for this election?
What’s the specific policy you’re suggesting? At the end of each year, Sanitarium donates all profits to the church.
Would you like to see Churches lose charity status? It’s a vote loser for Labour who have a lot of church tithing voters, and it’s a donation loser for National who get a lot of money from a small number of churches, plus many (like luxon) are hard core christians.
There is simply no path to removing charity status from churches while 50% of NZ believe in a higher power.
The other option is to stop companies being able to claim charity donations as an expense, which is a good way to kill every major charity.
Frankly the last thing we want are bought-and-paid-for politicians deciding what is a charity or not.
The charities commission (I think) are the arbiters of charity status.
IMHO Sanatarium should not be a charity: they should be a non profit: unless profit is their goal of course, which it obviously is.
It seems to skate by with religious affiliation providing the charity status: churches are no more charitable than any other club.
Sanitarium is not a charity, it’s your average, normal company (actually two companies).
Seventh-day Adventist Church is a charity. The Charities Act 2005 lists “advancement of education or religion” as a charitable purpose, so the Charities Commission are unlikely to have any say in whether they are a charity unless they can prove the church is a sham.
The reason Sanitarium pays no tax, is because any donation a company makes to a charity is (rightfully) tax deductible. Sanitarium need only donate the amount of money they made as a profit and now they have no tax to pay. Any company could do this, if ANZ donated all their profits to the Cancer Society they would pay no tax. But there would also be nothing for shareholders, so they don’t do this.
Because SDA are the shareholders, they pay the profits as a donation instead of a dividend to avoid tax.
The only problem I see in any of that is that churches qualify as charities simply by advancing religion. If you removed that requirement, most small churches are likely to still qualify as charities under either reducing poverty, if they do that, or under the more general benefit to the community so long as they do something that is actually beneficial. Many small churches do actual charitable things for their communities, but I think large ones would have a harder time proving their community value.
I’m generally not against a charity being able to invest spare cash to better fund future years, but my opinions on things are pretty easily swayed 😆
Seems like they’ve reinstated supply to the Warehouse, stating they’ve cut export volumes to do so… have some doubts around that being the entire truth
Did anyone here run the Kiwi Kids Marathon? I didn’t but my neighbours in the 90s did.
I’m fine with Sanitarium being a charity. Academics and Redditors just hate anything to do with Christianity and want to persecute Christians at every opportunity. Back to the original topic though, Sanitarium made a mistake here. I’ve thought about buying cereals from The Warehouse but the range is extremely limited, Sanitarium should definitely keep selling WeetBix to The Warehouse, I’m sure many families benefit from it.
Academics and Redditors just hate anything to do with Christianity and want to persecute Christians at every opportunity.
What a stupid take.
It has nothing to do with their religion, and everything to do with running a for-profit organization under the guise of ‘charity’. If the church they donate profits to does charitable works, they are a charity. Sanitarium benefits from tax-free status without actually doing anything to benefit society.
Dave’s post above shows this isn’t correct. They pay no tax because they donate all their profit.
Sanitarium are not a charity. I’ve explained a bit more in another reply here.
In my view, there is nothing wrong with a church having charitable status. However, this status should be based on their charity, not based on them simply being a church.
Hell, we could apply the marae criteria to churches:
b) a marae has a charitable purpose if the physical structure of the marae is situated on land that is a Maori reservation referred to in Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993 (Maori Land Act 1993)and the funds of the marae are not used for a purpose other than—
(i) the administration and maintenance of the land and of the physical structure of the marae:
(ii) a purpose that is a charitable purpose other than under this paragraph.
And I’d add a charity should not be allowed to donate to political parties or encourage their members to. A charity should be non-political.
