Alan Kohler on raising the GST

Australia Broadcast Center

17 hours ago

Sydney Pead: The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has set his sights on tax reform, which will be the centrepiece of a meeting of the nation's best policy minds next month. But is a big shake-up of the tax system even possible in the current political climate? Today, the ABC's finance expert, Alan Kohler, on why these experts would be better off talking about artificial intelligence and even a hike to the GST instead. I'm Sydney Pead, on Gadigal land in Sydney, this is ABC News Daily.
Sydney Pead: Alan, the government's economic reform roundtable is next month and no doubt you're very excited about that. Just tell me first, what is this talkfest and who's coming to it?
Alan Kohler: So it's going to be in the cabinet room. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, hasn't said exactly how many people are coming, but he said that there's 25 seats around the table. So whether there's going to be some people standing up for three days behind them, I don't know. The 10 initial invitees include Danielle Wood, the chair of the Productivity Commission. Then there's four people from the ACTU, but two of them will be attending as alternates to the secretary and the president. So the secretary, Sally McManus, is coming and the president, Michele O'Neil. There's also the head of the Business Council, head of the Chamber of Commerce, head of the Australian Industry Group, and the head of the Small Business Organisations of Australia Group. So that's four people from business organisations, plus Cassandra Goldie, head of the Australian Council of Social Services. And that's the 10 so far.
Sydney Pead: Right, okay. So these sessions are supposed to be focused on three priorities, productivity, budget sustainability and economic resilience. The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is excited about it. He's even signalled bold tax reform could be discussed.
Jim Chalmers, Treasurer: Now no sensible progress can be made on productivity, resilience or budget sustainability without proper consideration of more tax reform. I don't just accept that, I welcome that.
Sydney Pead: Alan, in an ideal world, how ambitious should these participants be when it comes to fixing the tax system? How broken is it?
Alan Kohler: Well, it's pretty broken. The last time we had a look at it was Ken Henry in 2010, commissioned by Kevin Rudd, and he produced a massive report on the future tax system, which was almost entirely rejected. And the only bit of it that was used was the introduction of a minerals tax, which ended up being repealed. So look, I don't think there's any kind of expectation that that sort of thing is going to happen. When Jim Chalmers talks about budget sustainability being the goal of tax reform, presumably that means more tax.
Jim Chalmers, Treasurer: I am personally willing to grasp the nettle, to use an old saying, I am prepared to do my bit, the government is prepared to do its bit. And what we'll find out in the course of the next few months is whether everyone is prepared to do their bit as well.
Alan Kohler: So the question from the tax reform part of the discussion, it seems to me, is going to revolve around what's going to be the extra tax. Are they going to bring in a new tax? Or are they going to increase an existing tax, i.e. the GST? Or are they going to have a go at something like an inheritance tax, which a lot of countries have, or a wealth tax, which some countries have got as well? Look, my view is that I don't think Anthony Albanese is going to let him do anything particularly bold, because the Prime Minister has made it clear that he's not interested in big shake-ups.
Sydney Pead: But the government's already making some changes, right? Like its plan to increase tax for people with superannuation balances above $3 million.
Alan Kohler: Look, that's pretty small. It's sort of a toe in the water of a wealth tax. And everyone's complaining that it's on unrealised gains, which is basically if the value of your super fund increases, even though you don't sell anything and haven't made cash gains, you still have to pay the tax. It's on gains that haven't been realised. And everyone's whinging like mad about that. And it's really the first time that Australia has had a go at that kind of unrealised gain tax. And Jim Chalmers is saying they're going to stick with that. They're not going to make any changes to it. And so he's kind of staring down the opponents of it at this stage. But it's a fairly small thing. You know, it's not going to raise a lot of money. It's certainly not going to get the budget back into surplus.
Sydney Pead: And tax reform, it's always a tricky business because there's always winners and there's always losers. So if rewriting the tax system is a bit too hard for this roundtable, you've got another suggestion that they could be talking about instead, artificial intelligence. So why is that so important? Because there are some big moves on AI in China and the US worth taking note of, right?
Alan Kohler: Well, yeah, that's right. So look, in my view, the whole, or most of the discussion about productivity needs to focus on artificial intelligence because we're in the middle of this, what's clearly a revolution in technology that China is well ahead of virtually everyone else on. The United States is also having a go at it. President Trump's having, on July the 23rd, he's having what he calls AI Action Day, which is going to be a whole series of executive orders designed to regulate or mainly promote the use of artificial intelligence in the United States. So that's happening. That's three weeks before the roundtable. I think that they should have a look at what the United States is doing and have a talk about whether we should do the same thing and what bits of that should we pick up and what shouldn't we pick up. I mean, they need to think about what does Australia have to do to get us using AI in such a way that improves productivity.
Sydney Pead: And you had a couple of ideas here. One of them was to develop a national system for helping small and medium businesses get their employees to write better AI prompts. Can you just tell me about that?
Alan Kohler: I'm not by no means an AI expert. But from what I understand, there are kind of two ways for companies to use AI. One is top down, one's bottom up. Top down involves the CEO deciding to bring AI in to do a function and basically replace workers. So it might be doing the call centre, it might be doing data entry, and that's basically a replacement of human beings. The bottom up way is where people who are working for the company use AI to improve their own efficiency and productivity. And a lot of that comes down to how good you are at writing a prompt for the AI. The question is, what can the government do to help small businesses to better use AI? Can the government set up some sort of prompt writing advice centre that would help people do that?
Sydney Pead: Right. So it can be used more effectively.
Alan Kohler: Yeah. And I thought that was pretty interesting.
Sydney Pead: I guess the other issue is the fear around people losing their jobs. So one of these other ideas is to modernise the welfare safety net. Can you just tell me a bit about that?
Alan Kohler: Well, so at the moment we've got a system called JobSeeker, which has a certain amount of money, which is clearly everyone says is not enough, clearly not enough. And also it has a mutual obligation system. So in order to qualify for JobSeeker, you have to keep applying for jobs. That system has been around a long time and it sort of predates AI. The question is, will AI now result in a large amount of permanent unemployment? There's a lot of opinions both ways about this. A lot of people say, well, you know, everyone will find another job. Previous technological revolutions in history have not resulted in long term permanent unemployment. And it is true that, you know, we've got a lot of robots in the world and unemployment is in Australia 4.1%. So it's not as if the robots that are there have caused a large amount of unemployment. But I think there is a fair bit of fear as to, you know, well, what happens if there is this sort of big increase in unemployment as a result of AI and so people are scared of it? And I think that's understandable. What is possible is some kind of safety net for people thrown out of work by AI. How that might work, I don't know. I mean, it's difficult. Can you sort of separate off people who lose their jobs because of AI? You probably can't. How would you fund it? Could you fund it with a tax on AI? The problem with that is that you want to encourage the use of AI. You don't want to tax it. Taxing something discourages its use. So you want to actually, if anything, you want to lower the tax on AI so that people are more inclined to use it so that productivity improves. So, you know, it's kind of difficult to get your head around. But I guess that's what you get 25 smart people in a room for.
Sydney Pead: Yeah, that's right. So they could potentially strike the right balance there and improve the economy and productivity at the same time through AI. Moving on, let's talk a little bit about what other changes could come out of this roundtable. There's one change you think might be possible to try, which could balance the budget and look after more people. But a lot of people will hate hearing this from you, Alan. We should perhaps raise the GST. And by how much?
Alan Kohler: Well, look, there clearly does need to be more tax revenue. We've been through this before. In 1985, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating held a tax summit because there wasn't enough tax revenue. And they went to that tax summit with three proposals. One was the GST. Another was the capital gains tax. And the third thing was fringe benefits tax. And the tax summit happened in 85. And two of those three things got up. The GST did not. Treasury also said the same thing to John Howard in 1998 and said, you've got to have a GST. And so he went back on his promise not to have a GST. So we got one in 2000 because tax revenue fell short. And now it's fallen short again. So the question is, do we come up with another new tax as we did in 85 and 2000? Or do we basically just increase the ones we've got? And everyone's agreed that we've got too much tax revenue coming out of income taxes. I'm not sure this is right. But anyway, it seems to be a consensus view. And you need to also have a lower company tax rate because company taxes are coming down around the world and you kind of lose, you lose companies. They move. The only thing left really is GST. And the average GST around the world is between 15 and 20 percent. So increasing our GST from 10 to 15 percent would not be out of line with the rest of the world. Also, we exclude a lot of stuff like food. And so the proposal would be to increase the rate and to broaden the base so that you pick up more things. The problem with the GST is that it's regressive, not progressive like income taxes. That is to say it affects poor people much more than the well-off because they tend to spend more of their income on things that are subject to GST. So how would you make it less regressive? And Richard Holden and Rosalind Dixon, who are professors at the UNSW in Sydney, came up with an idea, which is did you have a tax-free threshold of GST? They proposed 12,000 a year, 1,000 a month. So all spending up to that amount per year would be GST free.
Sydney Pead: And so what, the taxpayer would then get that money back each year?
Alan Kohler: Well, that was the idea. I mean, I rang Richard Holden up and said, you know, how would you do that? How can the government possibly know what each person is spending? And the answer is he said, well, you don't have to know. You just give back the GST on that 12,000, which is $1,800. He reckons it should be in two lots of 900. So every six months you get a lump of 900 bucks in your bank account. Just means that you've, you know, you're getting back the GST you've paid on the first $12,000 of your spending each year. And I think that's a very interesting proposal.
Sydney Pead: Yeah. Something that they could talk about at the round table, perhaps.
Alan Kohler: Well, he reckons that you'd end up with a net extra $45 billion in revenue, which you could use to cut income taxes as well as balance the budget.
Sydney Pead: Okay. Many voters would say the government does just need to balance the budget and spend less. Is that an option?
Alan Kohler: Well, of course they say that. And yes, that's good in theory, but really it's the community, it's Australian society that puts the demands on the government. You know, the big things are not that available to change. You know, I mean, we've got the NDIS now and it's the Australian community has decided to look after disabled people better than we have in the past. Now, I think that the growth in the NDIS is keeping the treasurer and treasury awake at night because it's growing too quickly, but no one's suggesting any big cuts in the NDIS. And they're not going to cut the aged pension and they're not going to cut, you know, healthcare in general, because apart from anything else, the population is ageing. Actually, healthcare costs are going to increase inevitably. There's nothing they can do about it. And now also there's pressure to increase defence spending. We've agreed to this AUKUS thing where we're going to spend billions of dollars on nuclear submarines. So I just think that the pressure on the budget is such that there's nothing they can do about it. Really, the only thing they can do is increase tax revenue. But I mean, all of the business group representatives, business counsellors, etc. at the roundtable will say that, oh, no, you've got to cut spending. And so they'll end up having an argument that'll last all day about that and waste, just waste time.
Sydney Pead: And they should be talking about AI after all.
Alan Kohler: I think so. That's right.
Sydney Pead: Alan, thanks so much.
Alan Kohler: Not at all.
Sydney Pead: Alan Kohler is the ABC's finance expert. This episode was produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon and Sam Dunn. Audio production by Adair Sheppard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sydney Pead. ABC News Daily will be back on Monday. Thanks for listening.