State Budget 2017: Treasurer risks undermining job creation by taking on banks with levy

ANALYSIS: IF Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis wanted a fight — and I suspect he did — he’s got what he wanted.

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IF Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis wanted a fight — and I suspect he did — he’s got what he wanted.

But picking a brawl with the banks as the centrepiece of a Budget which is meant to be focused on jobs risks overshadowing and undermining the good work he’s trying to do attract new businesses to SA and incentivise those already here to invest and employ people.

The Future Jobs Fund combined with locking in cuts to payroll tax and expanding the Jobs Accelerator Grant are all seen as positive by the business sector.

But in business and particularly investment, reputation is everything, and our reputation was already that we are a mendicant state constantly traipsing to Canberra, begging bowl in hand. The Treasurer’s carbon-copy bank tax will only reinforce that reputation. It’s a fair call that he probably doesn’t care what anyone in the eastern states, least of all the bank bosses, are saying about him. If anything, being seen as the working class hero taking the cudgel to the banks — with the cover of Scott Morrison’s already announced tax, will be exactly what he wants.

But being sledged by bank bosses — with our own BankSA already labelling the new tax a “disgrace” — can’t help but entrench the view that we’re a state that’s not only expensive to do business in, but is unfriendly to the big end of town, while we’re simultaneously trying to attract head offices to set up shop here. And like it or not, conversations among the bank bosses over lunch in Sydney’s Circular Quay can have serious ripple effects in the SA economy.

An economy that is on track — by the government’s own estimates, to continue to lag the nation. Will it turn out to have been a smart move? I wouldn’t bank on it.