SYDNEY (Sept 15): ANZ Group chief executive Nuno Matos said on Tuesday that Australia had some of the ingredients needed to become a regional financial hub, but its unfavourable tax regime was holding it back.
Matos said Australia had developing capital markets and a big pool of domestic savings through its compulsory pension system, two conditions that were important to becoming a financial centre.
But it lacked a tax regime that was attractive to foreign capital, unlike other financial centres in the Asia-Pacific region, he said.
“You also need to have very favourable taxation (to be a financial hub). And in that case, Australia does not have it,” the Portuguese-born former HSBC executive told a conference in Sydney.
He said capital was not attracted to high-tax environments.
“Hong Kong and Singapore, they are basically 0% tax on capital,” Matos said.
Australia should not “expect to be a financial hub if you don’t attract capital, financial capital”, he said, adding that “capital taxation needs to be different”.
In June, Australia’s parliament passed legislation scrapping the 50% capital gains tax discount on assets held for more than a year from July 1, 2027, returning to the pre-1999 policy of taxing inflation-indexed gains, with a 30% minimum tax on net capital gains.
Australia’s parliament also passed legislation last week broadening the types of assets on which foreign residents are subject to capital gains tax.
Asked about the impact of AI on businesses, Matos said it was changing jobs and warned that workers who failed to adopt it would be left behind.
“If you are not an AI adopter, you will lose your job to someone that is an AI adopter,” he said.
He did not rule out the possibility that AI could cause large-scale job losses at the bank, saying “nobody knows” what would happen. AI’s development and adoption also needed to be accompanied by guardrails and limitations, he added.
“AI at this point in time is creating risks at a much higher pace than what their own builders and developers were thinking about it,” he said.
The remarks come after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI companies to slow the rate at which they developed the technology.
The call was supported by Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
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