Bank gives Greens valuable lesson

Commonwealth Bank of Australia boss Matt Comyn demonstrates admirable restraint in calling the Australian Greens on their “insidious populism”. Party leader Adam Bandt proposes $514bn “Robin Hood reforms” on excessive corporate profits to fund significant cost-of-living support, which makes Mr Bandt less Robin Hood and more like the Sheriff of Nottingham, upping the tax take to give government ever more money to distribute as it chooses.

In evidence before a House of Representatives committee on Thursday, Mr Comyn pointed out inane assumptions in the Greens’ scheme – that corporate profits were “unjustly extracted from consumers”, that “there is some pool of assets and capital which can be tapped whenever it is convenient, and there will be no consequences”. And he lamented “performative policies that are designed to attract attention lack rigour and merit and rely on assumptions that are demonstrably false”.

Perhaps like the Greens’ plan to apply a tax on “excessive profits, beyond a normal return to shareholders” on companies with $100m-plus turnover, which appears to assume income is the same as profit.

While the economics are obvious, the case for his company as a social good is not an entirely easy one for Mr Comyn to make – banks are often less disliked than loathed, at times for good reasons, as the Hayne royal commission pointed out.

But this does not diminish the fact that their core function is to keep the Australian economy ticking over, or deny the benefits they deliver. Mr Comyn cited the 50,000 people who work for CBA and the $8bn in dividends it pays. Last year, 75 per cent of CBA income went to customers and Australian investors as dividends and interest, to superannuation funds, to employees and to government in taxes. Which raises a question for Mr Bandt: how many millions of ordinary Australians does he intend to take income away from?

There was much more in Mr Comyn’s evidence, content Mr Bandt would embrace if he were interested in growing the economy to fund more education, healthcare and social services.

Mr Comyn said the existing tax system was not as “efficient or fair as it should be”, too reliant on taxing income and not enough on taxing wealth. He pointed out that younger Australians were taking the hit from inflation and high interest rates. He also raised a real reformer’s issue: tax reform is required “to drive continued prosperity and productivity”.

Mr Comyn’s remarks this week will do CBA’s reputation far more good than his bank’s $2m virtue-signalling donation to the Indigenous voice campaign last year among Australians who want the opportunity to improve their lives rather than rely on government.

We need much more like it from many more business leaders lest the Greens’ portrayal of business as pantomime villains and profit as theft starts to stick in the minds of the young people to whom Mr Bandt is pitching.