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Awake at night … again

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Awake at night ... again

CCA CEO David Crosbie writes for the Community Advocate, 12 November 2025.

Managing a charity or not-for-profit in Australia is often more complex than it may appear. On any given day, there’ll be hard decisions to be made, decisions that affect people’s lives. It’s always a fine balancing act, made more difficult by the uncertainty and instability of an ever-changing internal and external environment.

In the NFP world, the budget an organisation begins the year with can go in many directions – expected income may not continue or additional income may be realised – and this raises questions about what then are the key priorities.

If income for services is reduced, does the organisation have the option to cut elsewhere and maintain services? Could it spend less on the support and infrastructure that enable and feed into the effectiveness of their services? Would that be a good decision? Is there a line of credit the organisation can fall back on? Does it have reserves?

Should the organisation invest more in fundraising to try to build its income? Where does the money for that additional investment come from? How does an organisation diversify its income if it can’t invest in pursuing new opportunities?

Where does it get the money to meet rising costs like insurance and power bills and climate adaptation?

Even when the priorities are clear, there is often a broad range of decisions to be made about how best to apply resources in a given area. On staffing alone, there are many different approaches. Should the organisation pay more to attract staff with higher level skills and experience who can deliver quality programs and services, or should it reduce salaries and make more people part time to increase the number of available staff and offer more services to more people?

How important is having workable office space or reliable transport that doesn’t cost the organisation more through ongoing maintenance? Has the organisation covered off its work safety obligations, including steps to reduce psychological hazards in the workplace and ensuring work from home set-ups have been ergonomically assessed for health and safety?

Is the organisation’s information stored appropriately? Do its systems meet privacy requirements? Has the organisation established data systems that are able to inform the organisation about its work and effectiveness? How does it measure its outcomes and impact? How safe is it from a cyber-attack? What is the organisation’s AI policy?

These are just a few of the many issues CEOs and program managers face in the NFP sector. There is a much longer list of questions we could ask.

This kind of decision making, grounded in uncertainty, but informed by mission and purpose, is what NFP CEOs and managers have to deal with. It matters. It’s the context, the reality in which many of us operate, the day-to-day environment we work in that many governments, funders, unions, advisors and others either don’t understand, or don’t accept. Sometimes, even people in our own organisations seem oblivious to the challenges we face.

I raise this complexity not to complain – like most of my peers I feel privileged to take on these challenges and make a difference in the world – but to explain a little about why we see what we see across our sector.

Over the past couple of months, I have been arguing with unions and government officials about the real costs of restricting the capacity of charities to employ staff on fixed term contracts that align with the available funding. While CCA won a concession – a temporary exemption for charities under $10 million – there was little acknowledgement of how the employment rules applying to repeat contracts would negatively impact many charities.

This week Infoxchange released the 10th edition of its Digital Technology in the Not-for-profit Sector Report. Many useful and informative findings emerged in this latest report, not only about where we are, but also where we were 10 years ago.

For me, the key finding is that the number one issue for leaders in our sector in relation to technology is trying to find the resources they require to fully realise the potential of technology to enhance their capacity and effectiveness in pursuing their mission.

And when we look at who is doing well in this area, it will come as little surprise to know it’s the organisations that have invested more in their digital capacity who are ahead in critical areas like cyber security, effective use of data and adoption of AI.

CEOs in our sector can see the potential of technology and AI. They want their organisations to do better by drawing on emerging technologies, but if the only way they can do that is by reducing services to the community they serve, how does that work?

What we are now facing is a charities and not-for-profit sector where those with the resources will be able to leverage technology to enhance their programs and services, while those without – typically smaller organisations – will be left to scramble along behind with whatever they can spare.

And many charity and not-for-profit managers will continue to lie awake at night wondering where the resources they need to take advantage of emerging technologies are going to come from.

Emerging technology offers both real benefits and real risk. If Australia is to become more innovative and productive, if we are to ensure our safety and maintain our values, investment in technology for the charities and NFP sector should be a very high priority.

Read in the Community Advocate:

Awake at night … again | Community Advocate, Institute of Community Directors Australia

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Why not prepare a Pre-Budget submission?

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Why not prepare a Pre-Budget submission?

CCA CEO David Crosbie writes for the Community Advocate, 26 November 2025.

Charities and not-for-profits can be outstanding advocates for their cause, their community, their purpose. I’m constantly reminded of the tremendous advocacy skills that exist within our sector across many challenging and complex areas of national and international policy. At the same time, I am often dismayed by the lack of advocacy from our sector on behalf of itself. This is not surprising. Self interest is not a big motivator in our sector.

One of the positive advocacy steps many more charities and not-for-profits might consider taking is making a submission as part of the 2026–27 pre-Budget submission process.

Submissions are now open – they close at the end of January 2026. To make a submission, go to https://consult.treasury.gov.au/2026-27-pre-budget-submissions.

It’s important to adopt a realistic approach to pre-Budget submissions, in terms of both your expectations and your effort.

It is highly unlikely that just because a charity or not-for-profit makes a pre-Budget submission calling for a new federal Budget measure (e.g. the introduction of a limited form of estate duties when people die), the Treasury and government will suddenly adopt that measure.

Having a government adopt new policies – especially policies that require new legislation or new expenditure – often takes sustained effort across multiple levels of advocacy involving detailed costings and modelling, drafting possible legislation, sustained public campaigns and extensive strategic political alliance building.

A pre-Budget submission can be part of the process of driving change and reform, but it’s unlikely to be enough on its own.

Being realistic about the amount of effort a charity or not-for-profit can and should put into preparing a pre-Budget submission means understanding that a small organisation with limited resources, for example, isn’t going to prepare a 20-page submission with detailed costings, policy modelling, and colourful graphics highlighting every aspect of every proposal.

Of course, some well-resourced organisations do prepare comprehensive pre-Budget submissions, but it’s also possible, and often appropriate, for a smaller organisation to simply send in a two-page letter. In fact, a well-focused letter explaining an issue of concern and outlining possible ways to address it can be just as powerful as a fancy booklet prepared by an expensive consultancy firm containing vested-interest policy asks backed up with detailed technical arguments.

So, given that a pre-Budget submission is unlikely to change much and will require some effort, why bother?

The answer lies in three critical benefits.

Making a pre-Budget submission requires an organisation to ask itself what matters, what it wants to change, how it wants it to change, and what it should prioritise in terms of how the federal government can better support its work.

At the Community Council for Australia (CCA), we find that the preparation of a pre-Budget submission provides a beneficial opportunity to check that our core policy platform is endorsed and supported by our members. All members see our pre-Budget submission and have a chance to have input before it is finalised. This is a valuable exercise in affirming our federal government policy focus.

The second benefit is that regardless of how tiny the impact, the fact that a charity or not-for-profit takes up the invitation from the federal Treasury to have some input into the most important policy document a federal government prepares is noteworthy. It reinforces an organisation’s role and credibility as an advocate for its purpose and its community.

The third benefit is about our sector as a whole. Imagine if 10 per cent of all charities made pre-Budget submissions. That would be over 6,000 submissions from charities working at the heart of communities, articulating in their own words the sector reform they need to better support their capacity to do what they do in making Australia a better place. The weight of many voices, from across communities, arguing for the value of their work and what charities need to be sustainable and effective in a very tangible way is a great way to act individually and collectively to lift the profile, contribution and needs of our sector.

Small business does this very well. In every local electorate around Australia and at virtually every public meeting a politician attends a small business owner will talk very directly about their value, their contribution and their needs. And it pays off – every Budget carries a section outlining how the government is supporting the important role small business plays in the economy and in communities.

Last year, a total of 789 pre-Budget submissions were received and published by the Treasury. Many of these submissions came from peak bodies, many from charities and not-for-profits, some from for-profits. If there were significantly more submissions this year for the 2026–27 federal Budget, it would add political weight to reform arguments being put forward by the sector, including in critical areas such as deductible gift recipient (DGR) reform and support for new technologies.

If your organisation is unsure what should be advocated for in a pre-Budget submission, I suggest looking again at the sector blueprint, checking peak body submissions relating to the area you work in, and reviewing the submission CCA made last year.

Our sector can’t afford to sit back and wait to be attended to. If the sector is to be valued and much-needed reforms are to be delivered, we all need to be more active and effective in our advocacy, not just for our causes and purpose, but for ourselves, the people we work with and work for. A pre-Budget submission is a low-cost way of at least putting our hands in the air, and that can only be a good thing. Who knows – we might even get noticed.

Read in the Community Advocate:

Why not prepare a Pre-Budget submission? | Community Advocate, Institute of Community Directors

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The real cost of profit: How human services became a commodity and children paid the price

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The real cost of profit: How human services became a commodity and children paid the price

CCA CEO David Crosbie writes for the Community Advocate, 29 October 2025

One of the most contentious debates across many areas of human services is the for-profit versus not-for-profit debate.

It’s important to acknowledge that there are brilliant businesses doing amazing things for their communities, just as there are thousands of not-for-profits making a real difference to people in need. There are also exploitative businesses extracting money from the vulnerable to line the pockets of rich investors, and a minority of not-for-profits who seem driven by self-serving profit (surplus) over purpose.

What we know from repeated studies in Australia and around the world is that in certain parts of our sector, not-for-profit providers offer a higher quality of care to a more diverse client group than for-profit providers. Probably the three best-researched areas where this outcome can be demonstrated are healthcare, aged care and childcare.

This week saw the ABC’s Four Corners program reveal paedophiles operating in our early learning childcare settings. It made for difficult and concerning viewing.

One of the key findings of this investigation was that for-profit childcare providers appeared to have a significantly higher level of child abuse – so much so that reporter Adele Ferguson recommended that parents who are concerned about their child’s safety should try to get their children into not-for-profit childcare services.

The statistics cited in the Four Corners report were that 88 per cent of all child abuse in childcare settings occurred in for-profit providers, while for-profit providers currently make up around 70 per cent of childcare providers.

The studies comparing for-profit to not-for-profit services suggest there is evidence telling us why in some areas not-for-profits tend to provide a higher quality of care.

In aged care, not-for-profit providers tend to operate with higher staff to resident ratios. A higher staff ratio – more staff relative to the number of residents – translates into more staff time for each resident, a central factor in quality of care.

Studies within hospital settings have consistently found that higher staff ratios not only improve patient safety and care, but they also reduce staff burnout, improve safety, and drive better health outcomes.

It’s not hard to understand how higher staff ratios might offer significant benefits in many services, including childcare.

It’s also easy to see how increasing the number of staff per client/resident/child drives up costs and drives down profitability.

Quality versus cost, or purpose versus profit, is an inherent dilemma for all human services provision. Organisations will make more money if they can reduce costs and maintain the same income.

The major cost in most service provision is staffing. Managers (both for-profit and not-for-profit) can choose to make more money by employing fewer staff, employing staff with lower skills, or paying staff less to provide the same services.

Generating more profits in childcare has become an increasingly important priority across the sector. Childcare is now seen by investors as a business opportunity, in a market where demand continues to outstrip supply. In the past 12 years, the number of for-profit childcare centres has grown by 60 per cent while the number of not-for-profit childcare centres has grown by only 4 per cent. Private equity firms and large for-profit companies are actively buying up childcare businesses. For instance, the Only About Children centres featured on the Four Corners program were bought by the US multinational Bright Horizons for $450 million in 2022; Affinity Education Group was bought by the private equity firm Quadrant for $650 million in 2021.

There are now hundreds of childcare centres in Australia generating profits for international investors. What matters to these companies is return on investment.

Profit is not a dirty word. Without money, the capacity to pursue any purpose or mission is limited. But when we allow our human services to be commodified, we invariably risk what is most important to our communities: safety and quality of care.

The childcare story this week has yet again highlighted the real costs of human service commodification, costs that are a concern to all of us who want to see the highest possible level of service provision in our communities, especially for the vulnerable.

Putting profit before people is dangerous and needs to be challenged.

Purpose is more important than profit. As a sector we should always be proud and loud about the fact that we are driven by values and purpose.

Read in the Community Advocate:

The real cost of profit: How human services became a commodity and children paid the price, Community Advocate, Institute of Community Directors Australia

 

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Are you ready? Disaster season is here

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Are you ready? Disaster season is here

CCA CEO David Crosbie writes for the Community Advocate, 8 October 2025.

The Wurundjeri Indigenous people who live in and around Melbourne understand their environment as having seven seasons.

The Gadigal people living in and around Sydney describe six distinct seasons.

When I was boy growing up in the country there were only two seasons – football and cricket.

‘Disaster season’ was never part of my adult vocabulary – that is, until climate change pushed the intensity and frequency of natural disasters on to the national agenda.

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) wasn’t established until 2022. It brought together key roles from Emergency Management Australia, the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, and other federal departmental roles relating to emergency management.

NEMA held its disaster season briefing for the charity and not-for-profit sector last week. NEMA describes the higher risk weather season as commencing in October and finishing in April, the dates varying a little depending on what part of the country you are in. This is the season when the risk of bushfires, heatwaves, flooding and cyclones is significantly higher.

Based on the NEMA briefing, the upcoming disaster season will bring with it a significantly higher risk of bushfires in parts of Victoria and WA this season, along with increasing heatwaves in Tasmania and marine heatwaves in the north and south. There are likely to be more intense cyclones in the north due to high sea temperatures, and flash flooding will probably be more prevalent down the east coast of Australia where both day and night temperatures are predicted to be above average. This is on top of the usual level of risks for heatwaves, fires, flooding and additional extreme weather events.

As the planet warms up, and disaster season becomes entrenched in our understanding of our environment in Australia, the role of charities and not-for-profits becomes even more critical.

We already know that our sector can and does make a difference in the way communities experience and respond to disasters. It’s worth reflecting on both how we are perceived and what our role can be.

The media and government departments tend to focus on how charities and community groups respond in disasters through the provision of essential supplies like food, water, clothing and emergency shelter to those affected. Many charities and community groups also provide health services: first aid, specialist medical services, mental health support and counselling. Then there are the services we don’t always think about in emergencies – childcare, disability support, transport, energy, aged care, animal welfare, phone and internet connections. Often these services or access to them is facilitated by charities and not-for-profits.

The sector plays an essential role in connecting people, sharing important information about what’s closed or open, and how to get to places or access services.

And then there is laying the foundations for recovery, including running appeals, distributing materials, helping reboot the local economy, facilitating clean-up and reconstruction, and finding the resources people need through financial support packages and government services.

Most of these activities by charities and not-for-profits represent responses to a disaster. But many in our sector are already planning and preparing their communities for potential disasters, and this work is often even more important than crisis responses in reducing the impact of disasters.

At a recent community market I attended, one of the local charities had set up a stall to offer advice and guidance materials about the development of individual disaster plans.

The conversations at that stall were focused on engaging the community, increasing their understanding of the risks they may face, and encouraging families, friends and neighbours to have a response plan for when a disaster happens.

Also on the stall were people with lived experience of disability talking about how their needs might be different, as well as an animal welfare person, and links were provided to local, state and federal government contacts who all offer various disaster response options. Volunteer emergency services people were also present. This was organised by one community organisation, collaborating with many others, and drawing on all levels of government for the benefit of their communities.

We are all living on a warming planet where disaster season is becoming increasingly important to our safety and wellbeing.

It’s worth taking the time to think about how prepared we all are, what planning we have in place for ourselves and our organisations, and what more we might be able to do to ensure our communities are in a better position to respond when or if disaster strikes.

We know resilient communities have strong social connections in place. The evidence tells us it’s the level of social infrastructure that makes all the difference in the capacity of communities to respond and recover. This is the same social infrastructure that charities and community groups build in a million ways, every day.

It’s the local groups that are first on hand in a disaster, it’s the locals who are most likely to know who is vulnerable, missing or alone, and it’s the same groups of people who will be there sharing the road to recovery long after the flooding is over and the fire is out.

Imagine if our planning for disaster and resilience acknowledged and invested in local groups, in mapping and strengthening them and the social infrastructure to the same degree that we map and invest in our physical infrastructure?

Most charities and not-for-profits are not working in emergency management or response. Most don’t have a focus on our environment or even keeping us all safe. But in our changing climate, strengthening community connectedness, awareness, preparedness, and capacity to respond to disasters is clearly one of the most critical, unrecognised and unfunded roles charities and not-for-profits now play in Australia.

Just like the community group and volunteers I met at my local market.

 

Read in the Community Advocate:

Are you ready? Disaster season is here | Community Advocate, Institute of Community Directors Australia

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Holding the line against corporate power: charities at the barricades

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Holding the line against corporate power: charities at the barricades

CCA CEO David Crosbie writes for the Community Advocate, 24 September 2025.

If a business ran the government, a corporatocracy would likely emerge, prioritising profit over social good, leading to a government focused on corporate interests rather than citizen well-being. Essential services could suffer, like public safety or education, as their profitability would be questionable. This shift could result in reduced public services, increased economic inequality, greater environmental damage, and a government that prioritises corporate needs and benefits over the general population. (AI summary of corporatocracy)

The US is lurching towards becoming a corporatocracy.

One of the most worrying aspects of the emerging corporatocracy is the US administration’s determination to limit the effectiveness of the not-for profit sector. When I talk with colleagues in the US, I hear that they’re finding it increasingly difficult to operate in what is becoming a legal and political minefield.

It’s not surprising that US not-for-profits are targets in the US. Charities and not-for-profits are one of the most important protections against the various forms of corporatocracy.

In Australia, charities and not-for-profits are the heartbeat of our communities, supporting us all in countless ways. Our sector offers services in critical areas of our lives: health, education, arts, environment, emergency services, employment, housing, disability, media, aged care, childcare – you name it, there’s a charity out there making a difference.

Beyond providing vital services in our communities, many charities and not-for-profits take on an even bolder role: holding governments to account, pushing for policies that serve all Australians, not just a privileged few. This advocacy for government policies and practices that are about public benefit rather than financial gain for those who are already wealthy is a critical aspect of the work of the Australian charity and not-for-profit sector.

There is also a special group of charities and not-for-profits that operate as a buffer between our communities and the power of big business.

I note that there are many good businesses in Australia seeking to strengthen their communities and wanting to achieve a better Australia as well as generate a profit. But there are also companies that have a track record of repeatedly putting profits well above any community or environmental concerns.

Perhaps the best examples in Australia of charities and not-for-profits that face a daily David and Goliath struggle against vested business interests are the environmental organisations battling against the immense power and wealth of fossil fuel giants.

But they’re not alone. In practice, the battlegrounds between our sector and exploitative big business are many and varied.

Currently, there are Australian charities and not-for-profits standing up to the global tech titans, calling out the rampant data theft and the monetisation of our personal information, and working to place limits on the damage tech companies can do to the most vulnerable, including our children.

Other charities and not-for-profits are pushing back against the relentless marketing and exploitation of alcohol, tobacco and gambling companies, demanding that public interest and safety are not sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit.

This week, we’ve seen the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, a member of the Community Council for Australia, publicly taking on the lack of regulation and accountability within telco companies that have clearly put profits above community safety and wellbeing.

What unites these charities and not-for-profits is their willingness to call out inappropriate behaviour from mega-corporations even though many of these companies have massive war chests to protect their profits. Many of these same companies are backed by mainstream media and politicians they have bought off in one way or another.

What inspires me most isn’t just the courage these charities and their leaders show in challenging exploitation by the powerful, although all too often they do not get the praise they deserve. What I see as the emerging strength in many of these organisations is that they’ve done the hard work. They draw on solid evidence and offer solutions, not just slogans; they promote practical ways forward that will make a difference, not just criticism of what is. They build collaborations. They have good people working behind the scenes developing well informed policies.

Policy work in charities is not always valued, but if we are to make sustainable changes in people’s lives, the economic, regulatory and political structures that drive both good and bad practice need to be addressed. Knowing what’s wrong and knowing where we need to get to is only part of the story. We don’t celebrate our policy workers enough, but without them the depth and strategic direction of our advocacy are limited.

When we think about charities and not-for-profits in Australia and the role they play, we should never underestimate the importance of the leaders in our sector who call out and stand up to inappropriate and exploitative practices. The buffer they bravely provide against much more powerful vested interests is a critical component in preserving our democracy and enabling us to achieve the kind of Australia we would like to live in.

Read in the Community Advocate:

Holding the line against corporate power: charities at the barricades | Community Advocate, Institute of Community Directors Australia

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Storytime: A stranger comes to town

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Storytime: A stranger comes to town

This has been another big week in the evolving story of tech oligarchs versus Australia, profit versus public interest, sovereignty versus global power, exploitation versus safety, writes CCA CEO David Crosbie for the Community Advocate.

I tend to think in stories or narratives. It’s my way of making sense of what seems to be an increasingly nonsensical world.

Thinking in stories is hard-wired into us; it’s a critical human survival mechanism. Understanding stories and what they mean is at the heart of human adaptation and development.

A stranger has come to our town, a stranger seeking money and power. We have seen strangers before, but this stranger brings even more amazing new toys, capturing our attention, then stealing our data, our information, our writing, our photos, our music and art, our work and our lifestyle choices. This stranger is making obscene profits from their theft by selling who we are to people and companies that specialise in telling us what we need, or, worse, by exposing or exploiting our own vulnerabilities to gain attention from others.

Time for a story.

I recently attended the launch of brand-new fences around my local tennis club. One of my roles as a committee member was to meet and greet the local politician who had supported our fence funding submission and was coming to celebrate our club’s achievements.

During our conversation, I asked the politician what they noticed when they looked around.

There were about 80 people gathered in our grounds and on our four tennis courts. Some were playing tennis, there was a fastest serve competition, a barbecue, a coffee machine; a few older teenagers were coaching a larger group of children. There were vibrant huddles of young people, families, older adults in chairs, children running around, a scene we would all be familiar with.

The politician said, “What am I looking for?” I asked her how many mobile phones she saw. She looked again. Not one person was on a phone. She smiled and passed me her mobile phone, saying, “Do you mind looking after this for me for the next hour?”

When I think about the work of charities and community groups, how we describe our work, our value, I think we often underplay the real benefit we provide in promoting and encouraging the sharing of our stories. I’m not sure what the monetary value of such interactions is, or how they inform policy or practice, but I know they build understanding, connection, trust, compassion, belonging, care. For most of us, these are the essential elements of a meaningful life.

“We can all enjoy our tech but still insist on guardrails and limits around companies and what they promote and profit from.”

I also know that in telling the stories of entrapment and exploitation by big tech we can provide strong support to our eSafety Commissioner and groups like the Alannah and Madeline Foundation. The battle to retain some limitations on the exploitation of the vulnerable by big tech is clearly a David and Goliath struggle.

We can all help in our own way, including acknowledging the small but significant policy gains we do manage to make. This week, the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, registered six new codes under the Online Safety Act, designed to limit the growing number of children accessing harmful content online. “Having worked in the technology sector for 22 years, I know what they’re capable of,” she told ABC TV’s 7.30 program. “Not a single one of them is doing everything they can to stop the most heinous of abuse to children being tortured and raped.”

We can all enjoy our tech but still insist on guardrails and limits around companies and what they promote and profit from.

We can model and teach responsible use of technology in our own lives and in our organisations.

In a world where attention has become a commodity, we can promote attention on the moments of real connection and insight, the things that do matter in the lives of our communities. We can provide alternative platforms for unfiltered, unmonitored, person to person interactions and storytelling.

The story of the stranger who comes to town always ends with a major change, a new state of normal, a new way of seeing or being, a new beginning of one kind or another.

Technology is changing the world we live in, as it often has. And the new technology we are grappling with today will be superseded by even bigger changes we will need to deal with – not just in relation to online safety but as AI and quantum computing evolve beyond our imagination. All these changes will affect how we communicate, the way we use data and information, and the tools we use to relate to each other.

As charities and community groups, we have a critical role to play in shaping what a changed world looks like. The best way to do that is by telling our stories, connecting people and communities to opportunity, support, and each other.

We will achieve the kind of world we want to live in only if we work together to ensure that exploitation for profit is not the dominant driver of our response to the stranger in town.

First published in the Community Advocate.  Read here.

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The sector must step up its advocacy, because doing good work isn’t enough

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The sector must step up its advocacy, because doing good work isn’t enough

There is no Department of Charities in the federal government, no red book, no blue book for an incoming minister prepared by a team of diligent public servants. In fact, there are no public servants employed by the federal government to monitor or look after the effectiveness and capacity of the charity sector, nobody monitoring our economic and social contribution to communities, writes CCA CEO David Crosbie for the Community Advocate.

Of course, charities have a regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, and the ACNC does an outstanding job of engaging with the sector and setting standards for governance and reporting. The ACNC is a very good regulator, but it is not an organisation that has a mandate on sector capacity.

And we have one of the best qualified charities ministers in the world in Dr Andrew Leigh. Who else in any government anywhere has a PhD related to community connectedness? And Leigh has written more than a dozen books, including Disconnected in 2010, and Reconnected: A Community Builder’s Handbook in 2020 (with Nick Terrell, his chief of staff). Dr Leigh is an excellent Assistant Minister for Charities in terms of his knowledge, experience, insight and understanding, but he has not been given the significant resources needed to prosecute the charities and not-for-profits reform agenda.

This week I have again been reminded of how difficult it can be to seek support from government for policies that will have a positive sector-wide impact, as I have found myself revisiting the same arguments about what the sector needs to be more productive and effective.

For years, charities have argued the need for longer term contracts to provide more certainty in our sector. Time and again, report after report, consultation after consultation, the case is made – even agreed. But little changes. Short-term contracting and funding uncertainty remain the norm, from both governments and philanthropists. This is the reality for most charities.

Last year, the charity sector was able to obtain a small exemption from the new employment law requirement to make every employee who has been contracted by a charity more than once a permanent member of staff. The exemption CCA argued for and achieved meant that charities could align employment contracts using fixed term contracts to the term of their funding agreement, within certain limitations.

If a charity obtained a one-year funding agreement to run a program, it could employ someone on a one-year fixed contract, and if it was rolled over for another 12 months, the same staff member could re-contract for another 12 months, and again the next year.

Of course, if the contract was for five years or more, or the employee had been employed by the charity in any capacity for a total of seven years, they still needed to be employed as a permanent member of staff.

The exemption to the requirement to employ staff on a permanent basis after two years or a maximum two contracts (if total employment was under two years) is due to run out at the end of this year, and unions oppose the continuation of the exemption. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations is now consulting on the issue and has held meetings and attended forums on the exemption. CCA is not confident that the harm done by charities having to divert funds from their purpose to provide for possible redundancy liabilities for staff employed against short-term funding contracts is seen as a serious issue. Having to make provision for redundancy is not seen as a barrier to permanently employing staff who were previously contracted, even when the funding is likely to cease within 12 or 24 months. Charities choosing to be honest about the likelihood of staff losing their role if the funding is not rolled over (again) and only employing staff on contracts for as long as the funding allows is being portrayed by some as bad management.

“It’s clear that doing good work is not enough, persevering is not enough, continuing to make the arguments and promote the value of our contribution to our communities is not enough. Even winning short term reprieves is not enough. All of us need to be better advocates.”

Ideally, CCA’s submissions outlining these and other related issues would have been backed up with a comprehensive set of statistics about patterns of employment across the charity sector. No such statistics exist, which allows the unions to talk about current employment patterns as though everyone employed in the charity sector operates under the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS award) and is fully supported by government funding. This is clearly a misrepresentation of reality. But without a more comprehensive sector overview, this is a view government tends to adopt.

In practice, I fear the only way CCA will be taken seriously in advocating to give charities some limited flexibility in when they contract staff and when they permanently employ them is to win enough support in the Senate to force a compromise – which is how the exemption came into being in the first place. Winning this support is a task CCA is now engaged in.

The second issue that again brought home the reality of advocacy for whole-of-sector support from government relates to the lack of cybersecurity funding for charities and not-for-profits. We know from Infoxchange surveys that our sector is highly vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and that the sector often holds important personal information as well as payment methods and details.

Many government departments have received additional funding to deal with cybersecurity threats, as has the small business sector. But despite intensive collaborative lobbying from many across the charity and not-for-profit sector (including CCA) and a concerted effort to work with government to design the best responses, no funding has been made available to support much-needed cybersecurity programs. And paying the full cost of service delivery, including recognising and paying a fair contribution towards supporting the organisational capacity programs rely on, is a rare exception. Not the norm.

The submissions from our sector are noted, but again and again governments choose not to act on what is needed to enable charities to be more productive and effective.

It’s clear that doing good work is not enough, persevering is not enough, continuing to make the arguments and promote the value of our contribution to our communities is not enough. Even winning short-term reprieves is not enough. All of us need to be better advocates. And that is the key challenge, not just to CCA and other peaks, but to all of us across the charity and not-for-profit sector. If we want things to change, we have to begin by changing ourselves.

First published in the Community Advocate.  Read here.

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Evaluation – more for less?

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Evaluation – more for less?

CCA CEO David Crosbie writes for the Community Advocate, 13 August 2025.

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with some actuaries: highly trained people who specialise in analysing numbers, statistics, risks and outcomes. We’ve been part of the Actuarial Hackathon where 40 young actuaries volunteered their time to collaborate with five Australian charities – the Wilderness Society, Justice Connect, Social Ventures Australia, UNICEF Australia and the Community Council for Australia – to transform complex datasets into practical solutions that are already driving real-world change. I’m proud to say the actuaries CCA worked with won the award for the best pro-bono actuaries’ program presentation.

I can’t yet talk about the full nature of their work with CCA, but it involved analysing the last 10 years of financial data for all charities on the ACNC register. Through trial and error, the group developed a “financial strength scorecard” for charities which they mapped across all charities to prove the scorecard they developed was predictive of whether a charity was more or less likely to fail in the next two years. In our early discussions, I was sceptical that financial information alone would allow predictions about future sustainability, but the performance of their financial strength scorecard surprised me.

In reviewing the findings, we talked as a group about how important outcome measures are in assessing the work of charities, and the limitations of focusing solely on financial indicators. This led to more discussions and debate about randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which the actuaries saw as the gold standard for measuring whether charities were delivering on their stated objectives.

These actuaries are not alone in this view. The Assistant Minister for Charities, Dr Andrew Leigh, has also championed RCTs. A recent review of the use of RCTs in the USA by researchers from the University of Chicago (Marwell and Mosley) found that both the use of RCTs by not-for-profits, and discussion about RCT findings about not-for-profits, has been significantly increasing over the last 20 years.

While RCTs often provide the clearest insights into what works and what doesn’t, especially in areas like medicine, I’m not so sure they should be seen as the best form of research when evaluating organisational effectiveness or the programmatic performance of charities and NFPs.

In their book Mismeasuring Impact: How Randomized Controlled Trials Threaten the Nonprofit Sector, Marwell and Mosley argue there are five main reasons RCTs are not always the best evaluation instrument.

From Marwell and Mosley’s book

My own experience is that there are any number of issues with implementing RCTs within charities and NFPs, not the least of which is the extraordinary amount of time and effort it takes to ensure appropriate levels of randomisation, standardisation of the intervention, and monitoring of critical indicators (often over years), as well as the enormous cost in staff time (countless hours of additional work), and the inability to capture and control for important variables such as affect (how people feel about each other), or broader community engagements and impact.

The bottom line is that there’s nothing standardised about how people provide and receive support, care and other interventions.

Of course, the difficulties with RCTs shouldn’t stop the charities and NFP sector focusing on outcomes and measuring impact. We’ve known for some time that our sector needs to get much better at demonstrating our value.

But perhaps the biggest weakness we have in evaluation and demonstrating value is not a lack of RCTs, it’s a lack of access to connected-up data.

Imagine if we could link health, education, socio-economic, geographic, justice system, social services, housing, employment and financial information together and use that information to monitor how engagement in various services affects outcomes?

What if we could link together the information charities and NFPs provide to governments and others about clients to the government’s own information about the services or payments provided to people? What if all government grants to not-for-profits were on a database with a shared dictionary, and this could be linked to government and sector data?

“Why do we continue to support the lack of data symmetry in the sector’s relationship with government and other funders? Maybe we start a ‘You show me your data, and I’ll show you mine!’ campaign?”

There is increasing pressure on almost every charity and NFP that receives grants to evaluate more, or better. The focus of this pressure is often the creation of more or new information. Is that really what is needed, or do we need to better use what we have?

I have watched as incredibly smart people have written analytical algorithms and applied them to a large data set provided by our sector (through our annual information statements) – data we have access to because government, when it established the ACNC, agreed to make the data collected from the sector available back to the sector. It made me realise yet again how good it is to have access to that data, but also how far behind our sector is at leveraging what we already know, the information we already have, the data we already provide.

With productivity driving discussions at a national level, now is a good time for charities and not-for-profits to highlight how government departments and other funders seem to be demanding more and more information, data and evaluations from our sector, but the same funders rarely provide any data or evaluations back to the sector or the community.

Why do we continue to support the lack of data symmetry in the sector’s relationship with government and other funders? Maybe we start a “You show me your data, and I’ll show you mine!” campaign? At the very least, we need to point out that if we had better, more accessible, connected government data, the need for every individual charity and not-for-profit to provide more and more evaluation data would be greatly reduced.

First published in the Community Advocate.  Read here.

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Failing to learn from failure is the worst failure of all

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Failing to learn from failure is the worst failure of all

Community Council for Australia CEO David Crosbie says it’s high time we had an honest conversation about the ATO’s attempted plan to have charities self-review. Community Advocate, 30 July 2025. 

Getting things wrong is part of learning, growing up, becoming better at what we do. How do you learn to walk if you never fall? We all fail sometimes. It can be a good thing. Failing is not the worst outcome; failing and pretending there is no failure is far worse.

Ten years ago, the astute and appropriately experienced Dr Peter Shergold was contracted by the Australian Government to conduct “an independent review of government processes for implementing large programs and projects.” The report Shergold produced was titled Learning from Failure: Why large government policy initiatives have gone so badly wrong in the past and how the chances of success in the future can be improved.

Unfortunately, it seems some people in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) are not familiar with this report, or at least that’s what I assume after reading the government’s response to the Senate Economics References Committee’s report titled Not-for-profit Entities – Tax assessments.

This is the new ATO measure that requires every large and small not-for-profit (NFP) in the country that has an Australian business number, and is not registered as a charity, to ensure that their business registration is current, they have a level two myGovID security set up (now myID), and they have completed a self-assessment return to the ATO.

The Economics References Committee report into this measure was handed down on November 1, 2024. The government’s response was tabled last week (July 24).

The Senate Economics References Committee made five key recommendations to address the emerging problems with the failure of over 120,000 mostly small, volunteer-run not-for-profits to comply with a new ATO requirement to provide an annual assessment return. Its report highlighted many issues including the significantly increased administration required of a mostly volunteer workforce, a level of confusion and concern about how to comply, and what was required.

The five report recommendations involved setting an income threshold below which the self-assessed return would not be required (the ATO had at one stage recommended a $2 million threshold), extending the deadline for lodging the return, handing over responsibility for collecting the return to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profit Commission (ACNC), improving the information available to NFPs, and significantly improving NFP sector engagement and the consultative approaches of the ATO.

“Neither the government nor the ATO have in any way acknowledged the findings of the Senate Economics Reference Committee that the implementation of this flawed policy is a major burden on many small volunteer-run NFPs and is not working.”

In its wisdom, the government considered the report’s recommendations, noted them all, and decided to do not much at all. In part of its response the government said:

“The requirement for not-for-profits to lodge a self-review return was put in place by the Morrison government through the 2021–22 Budget. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has been administering the reporting change in line with the Morrison government’s policy decision. The Albanese government has recognised that many affected organisations will be small and have limited resources, so we have ensured the ATO will take a practical compliance approach to help organisations meet the new reporting requirement….

“The Government supports the ATO and ACNC continuing to provide guidance to charities and NFPs on their obligations. As independent bodies, the ATO and ACNC decide the best ways of providing such guidance.”

I could discuss the government’s response to each recommendation in some detail, but I think there’s one over-riding concern about the way both the ATO and the government have addressed the significant issues raised by many NFPs and their representatives about this measure. Neither the government nor the ATO has in any way acknowledged the findings of the Senate Economics References Committee that the implementation of this flawed policy is a major burden on many small volunteer-run NFPs and is not working.

The ATO identified that “around 155,000 NFPs are currently self-assessing as income tax exempt and are now required to lodge the new annual self-review return.” The ATO also said it generally seeks to achieve an above 80 per cent return rate on required tax returns.

The current rate of return on this measure – completed NFP returns – is around 20 per cent, despite numerous extensions of return dates and final deadlines. And yet in giving evidence to the Senate inquiry, the ATO representative noted that “the ATO was ‘proud’ of its efforts to date in terms of the delivery of the policy.”

At what point can we say the implementation of this policy has failed? If the vast majority of the targeted NFPs have not completed the required return or alternatively registered as a charity, the policy is not working. Around 80 per cent or 120,000 targeted NFPs have not completed the required return.

The ATO may be a very effective agency in collecting tax, but this incredibly low rate of return indicates the ATO is not very effective when it comes to engaging positively with charities and NFPs. And that’s not surprising given charities and NFPs are a little outside its core business.

The ATO has tried over more than two years to make the NFP self-assessment policy work and it’s still trying, but the vast majority of targeted NFPs have not lodged returns. We can argue about why, but what we cannot argue about is that the measure has failed to achieve the desired policy outcome.

The ACNC is a world leading agency in terms of regulation and engagement with charities. The ACNC achieves around 75 per cent annual returns lodged by the due date from eligible charities.

Why not do what was always intended for the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission – the reason it has “not-for-profits” in its title – and have the ACNC collect annual returns from NFPs, beginning with the larger NFPs? This was recommended by the expert review panel that reviewed the ACNC in 2018, and the recommendation was supported by the ATO and the broader charities sector.

If we want returns from NFPs, let the experts at sector engagement collect them. The ATO can do its assessments and approvals after the returns have been processed by the ACNC in much the same way it does with ACNC registered charities.

The ATO has tried and failed. Now is the time for a new approach rather than continuing an implementation strategy that’s negatively affecting the NFP sector and not achieving the desired outcomes. Now is the time to learn from failure.

First published in the Community Advocate.  Read here.

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Disruptive ideas for boosting productivity and wellbeing in Australia

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Disruptive ideas for boosting productivity and wellbeing in Australia

Charities and not-for-profits aren’t front and centre of the growing public discourse about a productivity reform agenda, but that shouldn’t stop us from offering a few possibilities that might make a difference to the kind of Australia we live in, writes CCA CEO David Crosbie for the Community Advocate.

“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”

Chinese proverb

Most of the proposals I would promote are already well researched, are evidence based, and have at least been considered. But some are more ideas than proposals. They have a small string attached and are waiting for the right wind.

In government terms, there are three categories of ideas:

  1. Expenditure measures. These are measures that will cost the government either in foregone revenue or increased costs.
  2. Revenue neutral measures. These measures would require a reallocation of existing expenditure.
  3. Revenue generating measures. These measures would generate increased income for government.

Let’s look at the proposals in each category.

‘Abolish all state and territory regulation of charities.’

Expenditure measures

Reform deductible gift recipient (DGR) status rules. Incentives matter in giving. The current government incentives to encourage donations favour larger established charities. Reforming DGR eligibility to enable most charities to offer donors tax deductibility makes a lot of sense and would probably increase giving, especially to smaller community-based charities. (This has been recommended by the Productivity Commission.) If more money went to community-based charities, then community resilience and capacity to address local issues would increase, driving productivity and wellbeing.

Reform contracting of charities and not-for-profits. Long-term contracts provide stability, allowing charities to plan and invest in sustainable programs and services. This stability is crucial for building trust with beneficiaries and stakeholders and ensuring quality service delivery. Uncertainty minimises investment and reduces effectiveness.

All funding contracts for charities and community groups above $150,000 per year should be for a minimum of three years, preferably five. While there is a place for the small one-off grant, where significant contractual obligations are involved there should be an acknowledgement that charities can’t turn programs and services on and off like taps.

Larger contracts should have to make provision for the required infrastructure, IT, data privacy, cybersecurity, full operational costs and external evaluation. Expecting individual agencies to operate without adequate resources and to individually conduct meaningful in-depth evaluation of individual programs and services is both unrealistic and counterproductive.

Establish a national government-backed insurance agency to underwrite the costs of insurances for charities and community organisations. Insurance premiums are rising much faster than income levels in charities and community organisations, often eating into program delivery resources. Underwriting risk will become increasingly important as climate change and other factors drive up exposure to risks across the sector. It also makes more sense (and would be more productive) to share risk rather than outsource it to individual charities.

Revenue neutral measures

Develop a Charities Transformation Fund through a targeted 0.5 per cent levy on all government funding of charities and community groups. This fund (roughly $1 billion) would support investment in the following areas: climate change adaptation, cyber-security, AI adoption, impact investment and building income streams, concessional debt financing (e.g. lines of credit), uptake of new technology, staff training and development, research and evaluation, infrastructure and capacity improvements, renewable energy transition and increasing resilience in response to climate change.

The Charities Transformation Fund would also support the establishment of a Charities and Not-for-profit Centre of Excellence to support cross-program evaluation and learning (sharing of successful approaches) to drive improvements in effectiveness (as envisioned by the Productivity Commission). More effective charities and not-for-profits mean higher productivity.

Revenue measures

Revoke the generous tax concessions provided to gaming, catering, entertainment and hospitality income for mutual organisations, especially licensed clubs. The mutuality principle that rightly applied in the late 1800s in Australia is no longer appropriate or consistent with existing taxation arrangements, particularly for organisations involved in gaming. Licensed clubs that act as gaming venues should not be able to treat over 75 per cent of their income as tax free, especially when part of their core business involves taking money from the vulnerable through gaming machines, and they fail to satisfy the basic requirement of being a not-for-profit organisation that exists to provide a public benefit.

Introduce a targeted “estate duty” for people with estates valued at over $10 million, with appropriate incentives for donations to charities, safeguards relating to family businesses and farms, and mitigation of any potential adverse impacts. National estate duties exist in many countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Republic of Ireland, France, Czechia, Canada and the USA. Not only do these duties provide substantial government revenue, they also increase philanthropy by offering relief from estate duties for any money left to charity. The Henry Review drew on this international experience in supporting estate duties as a taxation measure. Among other benefits, estate duties can apply a small brake on growing levels of inequality in our communities.

And finally, I would propose one simple reform (with a small dose of incredulous irony).

Abolish all state and territory regulation of charities. It serves no constructive purpose. A well-functioning national regulatory system under the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission in combination with the powers of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to enforce any misleading or deceptive conduct would mean we would be better regulated without all the costs and complexities of multiple regulators.

How serious is the government about productivity?

The sum of all of the above measures is at least revenue neutral if we allow for the tightening of mutuality provisions enabling higher taxation of gambling-dependent licensed clubs, as well as the 0.5 per cent levy on government funding of charities. The revenue from estate duties would be a bonus.

It’s worth noting that there are other harmful concessions the government could remove that would mean a levy on government funding to the sector was not required for all the above measures to be implemented. Some experts have suggested cutting oil and gas subsidies, which amount to billions of dollars a year, and there are other options. Gambling concessions in NSW alone amount to over $1 billion a year.

I doubt the government has the courage to take on vested interests like Clubs NSW or the Minerals Council of Australia, despite knowing that the concessions and subsidies provided to these groups are not in the public interest. Governments have historically chosen to underwrite the extraction of fossil fuels and the exploitation of vulnerable gamblers rather than to investin more in critical areas like community building, health and wellbeing, education, housing, and environmental sustainability.

But then again, maybe the government is serious about boosting productivity? Maybe it sees the potential gains from a more productive charities and not-for-profit sector? The wind might be picking up. Time to build some windmills.

First published in the Community Advocate.  Read here.

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