ABA CEO Simon Birmingham on the economic contribution of banks: transcript of interview on FiveAA

E&OE 
Radio Interview 
FiveAA Breakfast with David Penberthy and Will Goodings  
17 March 2026. 

Topics: Tax paid by Australian banks; RBA Powers to regulate big tech  

David Penberthy (Host): Well, it’s a big amount of money, $16 billion that’s how much tax Australia’s biggest banks paid last year. And at the same time, organisations like Apple, Google and Meta, you think about the ease with which and the frequency with which we now go double click on our iPhones when we’re paying for stuff, when we’re doing online shopping, the amount of tax that is paid by these big offshore multinationals, and talking here about, you know, companies like Apple and Google, biggest companies in the world today, they’re doing absolutely none of the heavy lifting in Australia compared to our banks. Now, I know that people are reluctant to get the violin out for the banks, but on this case, they have a bit of a point, and it’s a point that was made forcefully yesterday at a Australian Financial Review banking seminar that was attended by our next guest, long standing friend of the program, former Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham, who now heads up the Australian Banking Association, Birmo, thanks for joining us.  

Simon Birmingham (Guest): G’day guys, great to be with you.  

David Penberthy: Great to have you on the show. The piece you wrote in the Financial Review yesterday, I thought, made some compelling points, and as I said, then you’re smart enough a person to know that the banks aren’t going to win the public over with a sob story. But it’s not a level playing field at all, is it? 

Simon Birmingham: Well, that’s the level playing field argument, indeed, is where we have focused the argument Penbo. That, yes, banks pay big taxes, and Australians think they should, and that’s fair enough. And so around $16 billion in taxes paid by Australia’s banks, second only to the mining industry in terms of the amount of tax paid. And to put that in some perspective, my understanding is it more than fully funds GP bulk billing, or could pay for essentially, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, almost. And these are big things our country depends upon, and those taxes paid by banks pay for it, fine, but what we’re seeing is that increasingly, companies like Apple when it comes to payment systems or Meta when it comes to scams, they are not pulling their weight and aren’t treated the same by regulation in Australia, and certainly aren’t paying the same when it comes to tax. T 

hey also aren’t the same when it comes to jobs, and the five largest banks in Australia employ nearly 180,000 people, and yet Meta, Google, Apple, employ fewer than 6000 so when you stack it up by contribution of tax or jobs or indeed actual regulatory impact, it’s just a disproportionate balance, and we’ve got to make those big multinational tech companies start to pay their way and face the regulatory equivalence of Australian industries and Australian businesses. 

Will Goodings (Host): Simon, you’ve been a former finance minister, explain to us what the difficulty is with pinning these multinationals down and getting them to pay a fair rate of tax. Because we’ve just come out of a chat with Phil Coorey, we’re talking about tax reform potentially that the Treasurer might contemplate at the next budget. And I can’t believe there is a treasurer in the history of Australia who would say I would rather make reforms to things like negative gearing and capital gains tax and so forth that affect Australian taxpayers than go after Apple. So, there must be some regulatory hurdle or difficulty with pinning down that the average person doesn’t see. What is that? 

Simon Birmingham: So Will it is about how costs for companies like Apple are attributed to the parent body and and how they make their contribution in terms of branding, R&D, those sorts of factors that minimise the degree of profit that they record in a country like Australia and therefore pay tax against. Now, we had sought to try to make sure that in terms of that incentive to profit shift, in the past, there’d been an agreement through the OECD to try to get minimum company tax levels across all the relevant countries, and that was going to be a way to remove the incentive to be shifting those profits around different parts of the world. In the last year or so, that’s fallen over and is no longer an option. So, governments do have to go back and look at things like diverted profit taxes and other ways to really try to capture that part of it. Now that’s for governments today to try to find those ways, in the tax sense, to capture the revenue, but it’s also important that we don’t let even more revenue leak off to those companies.  

And, so the Reserve Bank now has powers that it can start to use in terms how it regulates our payment system. It caps the amount that banks can charge in terms of fees on credit cards and debit cards, but there’s nothing about the amount that Apple can charge when you’re using that double click on your phone, and those are powers that with those newer laws that the Reserve Bank has, we’re eager to see them used so that we stop that leakage of revenue from Australian companies into those global multinationals who aren’t paying their way in tax.  

David Penberthy: Just to be clear though, Simon Birmingham, the bank, the banks, the big four banks, who you represent, and the other medium sized ones as well. They’re not arguing we want to pay less tax or we want to be able to charge higher fees for digital banking transactions. Rather, you’re saying, if we have to do all of this, why don’t the tech giants have to do more of it too? 

Simon Birmingham: Spot on Penbo. I’m not silly enough to think that anybody is out there saying banks need to be paying less tax, where our point is that we would argue we pay a fair share under Australia’s tax structure. I said, second only to the mining industry, more than any other industry sector, and that $16 billion doesn’t include the two and a half billion dollars that banks spend fighting fraud and scams and investing in things to try to keep consumers safer. These are all critical additional investments that you don’t see from those big tech companies, and that is where we’re just calling for equivalent treatment. It’s not easy, I know that from my past life, but we’ve got new laws in place, and there’s capacity now for regulators like the RBA to use those laws and to try to make sure that we keep that sovereign capability for Australians of having strong Australian banks employing Australian people and paying taxes in Australia. 

David Penberthy: Simon Birmingham, the CEO of the Australian Banking Association, thank you for joining us this morning. 

Ends