The bosses of Australia's largest companies have urged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to take a bold agenda to the May budget to salvage the country's faltering international competitiveness.
Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit, Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn urged business leaders, economists and policymakers to encourage ambitious spending and tax reforms.
"Within tax, you have to deal with intergenerational equity, we have to look at how do we most effectively boost investment, and we have to look at how can we simplify the tax system overall," he said on Tuesday.
Mr Comyn also urged cutting spending on runaway government programs such as health care, social security and the NDIS, although acknowledged this would be difficult.
His comments came as Business Council chief Bran Black called on Australia to fix its global competitiveness to attract more foreign capital.
Australia came in 21st place out of 42 countries on a new global investment and competitiveness index released by the employer group.
Despite placing near the top for trade settings, rule of law and energy, Australia was dragged down by excessive regulation and relatively high corporate tax rates and investment restrictions.
Since his economic roundtable in August 2025, Dr Chalmers has made moves to streamline red tape, including ordering regulators to cut regulatory clutter and setting up a single front door to make it easier for trusted foreign investors to gain approvals.
Mr Black said businesses were already starting to feel the benefits but employer groups wanted the government to go further by setting a target of reducing the regulatory burden by 25 per cent by 2030.
According to a report released by the Australian Institute of Company Directors in November, the explosion in red tape in recent decades was costing Australian businesses and the economy $160 billion, or 5.8 per cent of GDP, up from 4.2 per cent of GDP in 2013.
Mr Black also called for holistic tax reform to encourage businesses to invest more.
Australia's corporate income tax rate of 30 per cent for big businesses was among the highest in the OECD and made it harder to attract increasingly mobile global capital, he said.
Allowing businesses to more easily deduct capital costs, through investment allowances, immediate expensing, or reforming research and development incentives, would encourage greater investment and boost GDP growth long term, Mr Black argued.
BHP chair Ross McEwan told the AFR summit Australia's corporate tax rates and energy costs needed to be lower if the country wanted to attract global capital.
In competitors such as China and the US, smelters faced energy costs one-third to a half of what they had to pay in Australia, he said.
