Last night was the Business Council of Australia’s (BCA) annual dinner<\/b> at Sydney’s Four Seasons Hotel, down near The Rocks.<\/p>\n
The guest of honour, as usual, was the prime minister<\/b>. He also happened to bring close to half of his cabinet with him, including the Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen<\/b>.<\/p>\n
It turns out there was a cabinet meeting earlier in the day in Melbourne, so maybe they all hitched a flight together?<\/p>\n
The PM then embarrassed them all during his speech by asking them stand up and make themselves known to their fellow diners.<\/p>\n
In his speech, as pre-flagged across the media yesterday, Anthony Albanese<\/b> made a point of how his government had collaborated with the business sector in developing key policies, such as carbon emissions targets.<\/p>\n “I do want to make the point that for our government, engaging constructively with business is not a one-off event in Canberra<\/b>,” the PM said, referring to last month’s Economic Reform Roundtable.<\/p>\n “We do it every week of the year, in every part of the country.<\/p>\n “Because we value the insights you offer, as drivers of economic growth, creators of jobs and leaders in innovation.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As flagged by ABC political reporter Jake Evans<\/b> yesterday (see link below), corporate tax reform is one of the things on the government’s agenda, with a view to encouraging more investment to boost productivity growth.<\/p>\n But BCA chief executive Bran Black and president Geoff Culbert<\/b> had a strongly worded warning for the PM and his cabinet colleagues in the room.<\/p>\n Black called the Productivity Commission’s suggestion of a cash flow tax<\/b> on Australia’s biggest businesses an “uncompetitive and ill-conceived” idea.<\/p>\n Culbert was even more pointed in his message to the government.<\/p>\n “The focus post-roundtable must be on making Australia more competitive to drive business investment, and to raise living standards. That must be the test,” he said.<\/p>\n “That test leads us to some clear lines in the sand. Any increase in taxes on business doesn’t pass the test<\/b>.<\/p>\n “Indeed, even the spectre of an increase in taxes makes it very hard to underwrite long-dated projects that need certainty. We need to close down that conversation as quickly as possible<\/b>.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Culbert also warned the Labor government against any further industrial relations changes, such as following Victoria’s lead in considering to entrench minimum work-from-home rights for many workers.<\/p>\n “Any further regression on industrial relations doesn’t pass the test<\/b>, and winding back some of the recent IR changes that hurt our competitiveness and discourage investment should not be off the table,” Culbert argued.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The BCA represents Australia’s largest businesses and private sector employers, and the room was a who’s who of the top end of town.<\/p>\n I attended the dinner as a guest of the BCA and, yes, I was fed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last night was the Business Council of Australia’s (BCA) annual dinner at Sydney’s Four Seasons Hotel, down near…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[208,210,214,79,212,18,19,17,216,215,188,213,209,211],"class_list":{"0":"post-51773","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-asx","9":"tag-australian-dollar","10":"tag-bitcoin","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-dow-jones","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-live-blog","17":"tag-live-update","18":"tag-markets","19":"tag-nyse","20":"tag-share-market","21":"tag-wall-street"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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