The ATO’s e-tax appli­ca­tion is a pretty hor­ri­ble beast, and a per­fect exam­ple of some­thing that really should be a web appli­ca­tion — but it works on Wine near-perfectly. Sort of.

I just filled out my 2005 tax return on Linux, before get­ting to the final step and dis­cov­er­ing it wouldn’t print nor sub­mit elec­tron­i­cally (because, appar­ently, they can’t code and are depen­dent on Inter­net Explorer as a con­nec­tiv­ity layer — and yet they test for secu­rity before allow­ing you to down­load the pro­gram! Hah!)… but it would save just fine, so I copied my tax file across the net­work to a Win­dows com­puter (resent­ing all the while hav­ing to leave my chair, because I really shouldn’t have had to even leave my browser — In this instance Fire­fox — if they’d done this prop­erly) and imported, printed, and sub­mit­ted it elec­tron­i­cally with­out any sig­nif­i­cant problems.

Note that you can’t import a file from any­where — you need to actu­ally copy the file into the e-tax folder itself (prob­a­bly C:\etax2005) before e-tax will let you startup with­out cre­at­ing a new file. You’ve also got to enter your TFN again (pre­sum­ably as a mea­gre form of secu­rity) to get it to open the file.

It annoys me that they don’t even sup­port Mac users natively, instead say­ing that it will func­tion, if “suit­able Win­dows Emu­la­tor soft­ware” is installed. That’s so pre­sump­tu­ous I was tempted to fill in the sec­tion ask­ing for costs incurred in fil­ing the tax invoice, list­ing three licences for Win­dows XP pur­chased ear­lier this year (not really, but it’d be a nice revenge :)).

Okay, rant over.