State Government Bank Levy Makes South Australia Riskiest Place For Investment In Australia

Imagine being an international investor looking at Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis's Budget.  You wouldn't be interested in his infrastructure spend and "future jobs fund".

You'd immediately hone in on the fact that the South Australian government has doubled down on the Federal Coalition's bank levy by introducing its own state bank levy.

And you'd immediately understand that this makes SA the riskiest state to invest in, in a country that is looking like an increasingly risky place to invest.

South Australia has the highest unemployment rate in the nation.  It needs firms to put their money into the state and create productive private sector jobs.  No government spending can substitute for an attractive economic investment climate.

In this, the state's bank levy is almost comically bad.  The federal bank levy is arbitrary, punitive and unjustifiable.  Treasurer Scott Morrison groped around for a rationale for taxing the big banks, finally landing on:  people "don't like you".

Koutsantonis's tax is even more arbitrary and its rationale even more slight.  In his Budget speech, he said that the "banking sector is very profitable" and that given, in his view, the GST should be applied to financial services, SA should expropriate some of the big banks' money.

But this is nothing more than a rhetorical shell game.  The SA bank levy looks nothing like the GST, developed and refined over nearly two decades to be as efficient as possible.  The GST is a consumption tax specifically designed to be paid by consumers.

Koutsantonis says he will ban the banks from passing his tax onto consumers.  (This is astonishing by itself — the SA government is going to start regulating banks?  We ended state-based financial services regulation 20 years ago.)

Finally, the GST was specifically devised in order to get rid of state-based taxes on financial products.  These taxes — the bank account debits (BAD) tax and financial institutions duty (FID) — were uniformly agreed to be inefficient, to disproportionately harm the poor, and to harm Australia's international competitiveness.

Getting rid of the FID and BAD tax was a key part of the GST deal.  Is SA going back on that deal?  Is it dipping out of the GST compact?  How do Koutsantonis and Premier Jay Weatherill think the other states and Commonwealth, should respond?

With the imminent closure of Holden, SA needs to be looking to grow its economy and attract investors.  But if there's one thing investors hate, it is policy uncertainty.

Policy uncertainty is exactly what Koutsantonis has delivered.