Industry groups join in calls for budget reform

Some of the country’s biggest advocacy groups jointly representing billions in GDP and hundreds of thousands of jobs have written to the PM, Treasurer and Trade Minister calling for urgent reforms in this year’s budget and beyond.

The groups include APPEA, the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC), Group of 100 (G100), Corporate Tax Association (CTA), Australian Constructors Association (ACA) and American Chamber of Commerce in Australia (AmCham).

The groups are jointly calling to:

• Expand the availability of the temporary full expensing and loss carry back measures and make these measures a permanent fixture of the taxation law to avoid lost opportunities for jobs and investment.
• Lower the access threshold for the instant asset write-off.
• Ensure salary and wages costs are immediately tax deductible for capital-intensive industries.
• Remove barriers to business project restructuring by reforming the rules around transactions involving swaps of assets, permits and existing infrastructure in Australia, making them tax neutral.
• Continue to focus on removing, or at least reducing, distortions and barriers that impose unnecessary regulatory and tax burdens on business activity.
• Commit to long-term funding and support of skill retraining and development to create a more mobile and flexible work force to maximise active participation in the economy.

To read the letter in full, click here.