Strictly speaking, no. In Australia, businesses cannot pay suppliers unless they have an ABN, otherwise their payment will be subject to Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT). You can take money as an individual without ABN however. With PayPal this is already possible. You can run a small operation eg on ebay but as soon as you call it a business you should get an ABN, but then you also have to pay income tax on what you make.

From memory, the cutoff is essentially $50k for "seriously, you should register this properly as a business". The tax office doesn't want to chase businesses below this as a ton of them are hobby businesses and things get complex fast. Bigger fish to fry and all that.

There is a test to see if something is a business or a "hobby", it isn't a revenue cut odd, its more about the nature of the operation.

The 50k cutoff used to be the threshold for GsT registration, which is now 75k

Which actually effectively requires you to have an ABN to charge anyone in Australia. Without it, anyone you were selling to would be required with withhold 48.5%. How does an individual do that?

This is how: http://www.ato.gov.au/businesses/content.aspx?menuid=0&d...

Selling to individuals as non-business does not require any withholding

You mean PAYG withholding not FBT. But you are certainly correct that an ABN is not necessary to charge for something