The South Australian Major Bank Levy: Arbitrary, unjustified, and harmful for South Australia and the rest of the country

With Sinclair Davidson

Introduction: In the South Australian state budget 2017-18, South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis announced that the state government intended to introduce a South Australian Major Bank Levy, one of two revenue measures “to help us meet the cost of our significant support for driving economic growth and creating more jobs”. Treasurer Koutsantonis made clear that this levy was explicitly modelled on the Commonwealth government’s Major Bank Levy, which was announced in the May 2017-18 Commonwealth budget and passed the Commonwealth parliament in June.

Banking is a key sector in a modern economy. Banks and the financial markets they serve work to allocate capital across the economy to its most efficient purpose. The health of the banking sector is closely related to the health of the economy in general; likewise, an unstable and inefficient banking sector often causes, or is at least a leading indicator of, turmoil in the general economy. The centrality of banking and financial markets to economic prosperity and recession throughout history is reason to subject public policy proposals that affect banking markets to particular scrutiny.

This paper is an examination of the South Australian Major Bank Levy. The South Australian Major Bank Levy is intended to exactly replicate the Commonwealth Government’s Major Bank Levy but at the state level. Accordingly, it applies an additional 0.015% tax on South Australia’s share of the total value of bank liabilities that are subject to the Commonwealth Major Bank Levy Act 2017. That levy consists of a tax introduced on a range of liabilities held by the five of Australia’s largest banks – the Commonwealth Bank, the ANZ, the National Australia Bank, Westpac and Macquarie Bank. While these banks are not explicitly named in legislation, they are subject to the levy because they each have total liabilities greater than $100 billion – raising the prospect of new banks being added or of existing banks dropping off the list.

Both levies apply to the total liabilities held by each bank with the exception of that bank’s additional Tier 1 capital, its deposits protected by the Financial Claims Scheme (that is, its government guaranteed deposits), an amount equal to the lesser of the derivative asserts and derivative liabilities of each bank, and its exchange settlement account held with the Reserve Bank of Australia.

This paper finds that the South Australian Major Bank Levy:

  • will be economically harmful to a state that has seen a rise in unemployment and a decline in business investment,
  • lacks serious justification in either taxation or banking policy,
  • represents a rollback of the GST compact of 2000 which required South Australia to remove state taxes on banking and financial services,
  • harms the stability of banking in South Australia and Australia more generally,
  • increases ‘regime uncertainty’ for investors, and
  • there are reasons to believe it has already done harm to the South Australian economy.

Not only should the bank levy be rejected by the South Australian parliament, but parliament needs to work to ensure that markets and investors have certainty that such an arbitrary and harmful intervention could not occur in South Australia in the future.

Available in PDF here.