The answer is no.

You don’t need to have an ABN (Australian Business Number) to register any Australian company, including the (by far) most common type - a Pty Ltd company.

In fact, even if you do have an ABN (for example as a sole trader or a partnership looking now to register a company) it’s of no use or advantage when registering a company because the application process doesn’t even ask for it*.

If anything, it’s the other way around.

That is, once you register your company (upon which the company will automatically be issued with a 9 digit ACN - Australian Company Number), your company can then apply for and get an ABN (the ABN will be 11 digits long, the last 9 digits of which will be the same as the company’s ACN).

[* Very occasionally, however, there is a necessity within an application to register a company (as opposed to a prerequisite for an application to register a company) to supply an ABN. If one of the shareholders of a proposed company is the holder of a business name and the company that’s being registered is to have that exact same name, or a name that is deemed to be identical to it (& the business name was registered after 28 May 2012), then the ABN of the entity that holds the business name (whether that be a sole trader, partnership or whatever) will have to be supplied.]