Danielle Wood

We think one factor in that is the tax system.

It's not the only one.

But certainly Australia's headline company tax rate, it's not particularly competitive by global standards.

We know that company income taxes, which we're relying on, creates quite a strong disincentive for investment.

So the idea of the cash flow tax is that it's a different tax base.

It creates much less drag on investment.

Basically, you can write off investments in full as they occur.

And so the proposal was essentially to shift a bit of the tax base, to reduce the headline company income tax for all corporates, bigger reductions for small and medium ones, and to replace that with a cash flow tax, which creates less disincentive for investment.

Our initial proposal was to do that in a way that was revenue neutral.

We think there are a lot of calls on the government budget at the moment.

And so we were trying to design something that sharpens incentives for investment while not producing a hit on the budget.

When it came to the final report, we also showed a number of other potential options for the government, which would come at some budget hit.

We certainly had back and forth with Treasury.

I wouldn't say they were against it.

I mean, the thing with any tax change, Ellen, is there's going to be kind of pluses and minuses.

We were exploring some of the more technical challenges in implementation.

But I think they're certainly on board for the broad proposition that the current tax arrangements aren't serving us particularly well, that there are things that you can do, perhaps at no or modest budget cost, which would improve the investment environment.

So I think those conversations are ongoing.

Unclear to me.

That's the great thing about being at the PC.