Speakers: ABC The Business, Host Kirsten Aiken; Business Council of Australia Chief Executive Bran Black
Topics: BCA Annual Dinner, tax reform, investment
E&OE
Kirsten Aiken, Host: The BCA Chief Executive, Bran Black, joined me ahead of the Business Council’s annual dinner. Welcome.
Bran Black, Chief Executive: Thank you.
Kirsten: Is business losing patience with the Federal Government after those tax changes in the Federal Budget?
Bran: Well, there’s plenty of areas where we’ve worked very closely with Government. We worked closely in terms of the productivity package, in terms of supporting work with respect to research and development, as examples.
But by the same token, we’ve also said that we don’t support the tax changes that have been made. What that means is that we want to see a more ambitious productivity agenda, and we see that we’ve got a role in pushing that.
Kirsten: Okay, so business is frustrated with the Prime Minister. Is that the message you’re going to convey to him tonight?
Bran: No, what we’re saying very clearly is that we want to work together with Government to build a shared consensus on the real problems that Australia faces, so in turn we can start to build a shared consensus on the solutions, and we’ve got to do that by talking to communities and to small businesses, to people right across the country.
Kirsten: Can you point to an example where a major company has actually decided not to invest in Australia following on from the tax changes announced in the Federal Budget.
Bran: Well, what I would say is that it’s very clear that there are instances where companies don’t invest in Australia based on the overarching regulatory environment. We already read about many of those types of instances. We’ve seen, for instance, that Woodside has taken more investment decisions in the United States. We know that AirTrunk, as another example, declared that it would invest $42 billion in India rather than in Australia.
These decisions are already being taken. They’re being taken not just because of one measure, but because the effect of the accumulated measures that we’ve seen across industrial relations, taxation, or regulation or planning settings make it harder to do business.
The Business Council itself has said our Global Investment Competitiveness Index ranks Australia 21 of 42. So there’s enormous scope for us to do better, and we’re trying to motivate everyone, including our own community, to work to try and build the consensus to make that happen.
Kirsten: And so, on that, in working with Federal Government, what more can business itself do?
Bran: Well, I think, as I say, it really goes to that point about trying to build a shared consensus with the community. The Prime Minister, when he was at our last dinner, made the point that if you want to achieve reform, then you need to level with people and meet them where they’re at, and we need to do collectively a better job of doing that. That’s something that we’re trying to lean in to.
Kirsten: What does business need to tell Australians?
Bran: Well, let me go to an example, I think, of the types of conversations that we need to move from and to. So, if you consider a recent poll that I saw, showed that a majority of people surveyed considered that the primary driver of their cost of living issues was the Reserve Bank’s decisions to increase interest rates.
Now we know that that’s incorrect. Obviously when the Reserve Bank does that, it does that to respond to the types of challenges that are driving cost of living measures. But if people are thinking that, what that shows is that we need to do a better job achieving that shared consensus on the problem, because it’s only when we do that that we can start talking meaningfully about the solutions and creating that groundswell to support the type of reform that we know the country needs.
Kirsten: Bran Black, thank you.
Bran: Thank you so much.