iscoverThe tax community is hopeful the Economic Reform Roundtable will be the beginning of a shift towards comprehensive tax reform.
Experts see economic roundtable as tax reform catalyst
20 August 2025
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8 minute read
As the Economic Reform Roundtable is in full swing, members of the tax community have come together to share their “hopes and dreams” for the future trajectory of the Australian tax system.
Speaking on a recent Under the Hood podcast episode, John Ioannou, national head of tax at Macpherson Kelley, said the popular sentiment across all members of the tax community was the need and want for holistic tax reform.
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Though tax reform was a priority outlined by the majority of the community, Ioannou noted that the specifics behind this reform and what reform was applied would never be uniform.
“When you have a community that’s filled with academics, lawyers, accountants and regulators, I don’t think you’re ever going to have a uniform opinion,” he said.
“The devil’s always in the details, but I would think that we are all on the same page in respect of tax reform and what it largely needs to look like. I think at the moment, we suffer with or from the actual detail of what that plan needs to look like, and even if you can agree on what’s going on, it’s then executing that and selling it to the broader community.”
From his professional perspective, Ioannou said he believed the Australian tax system needed to change fundamentally as Australia was “genuinely and continues to be addicted to taxing effort”.
From a legal standpoint, Ioannou noted that policymakers needed to step away from mucking around with the corporate rates tax, individual marginal rates of tax, and make a move towards taxing consumption, such as GST.
“I think a large part of our hurdle would be expanding the GST base to eliminate all the current exemptions in doing that. I do think that needs to happen if you’re going to let go of our current reliance on taxing effort that of itself could go a long way to increasing tax free thresholds, lowering the marginal rate of tax and simplifying which is code for eliminating a large number of taxes that don’t raise a lot of revenue and are difficult to deal with.”
“Unfortunately, when people think about tax reform, they always think about it from a “what’s in it for me” perspective, which is why it has been difficult to talk about politically. We need to depersonalise our thought process about tax reform and explain it in a way as to why it’s good for our country.”
Ioannou said he didn’t expect any major announcements to come from the roundtable in terms of tax reform; however was hopeful productive conversation around it would be had by those in attendance.
“People need to understand where we come from, where we are, and the things that need to change to get to where we're going.”
“We probably won't be able to do all of those in one single go, but I think if people understand what the grand plan is, in a perfect world, hopefully you get better buy-in from people who are otherwise unfamiliar with the subject matter.”
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