Abolish State Payroll Taxes. By Commentary Australian Greens (not the Greens).

To hire a corporate worker at their headquarters in Melbourne, NAB has to pay a 4.85% payroll tax plus a 1.0% “Mental Health and Wellbeing Surcharge” (yes, really) straight to the Victorian government for every dollar paid to their employees. It’s literally a penalty for hiring Aussies. If they pay an employee $100k in a year, they also have to pay $5,850 to the state government.

Meanwhile, NAB can offshore that exact same corporate role to India, Philippines, or anywhere else overseas. The cost of doing that? Zero. No more payroll tax, no penalties, no exit tax, and no more statutory overheads to the Australian government.

Every single state in the country has a payroll tax for large corporates. The rates range from 4.95% in South Australia all the way up to 6.85% for the ACT.

For NAB alone, they’re forced to fork out $135 million a year in payroll taxes. They could hire well over 1,000 Aussies for that price.

You get less of what you tax, but more of what you subsidize.

When John Howard proposed the GST in 1998, he envisioned a 15 per cent GST to replace a range of Commonwealth and State indirect taxes, explicitly including payroll tax, petrol excise, and customs duty, while also funding personal income tax cuts.

After negotiations with lefties who held the Senate balance of power (the Australian Democrats), the GST rate was reduced from 15 per cent to 10 per cent, the tax base was narrowed (e.g. by exempting fresh food), and the states were only required to abolish four of the originally proposed nine state taxes (financial institutions duty, debits tax, stamp duty on marketable securities, and “bed taxes”) — so payroll tax was not abolished.