Treasurer Jim Chalmers urges WA industry to pressure Senate for swift deal on environmental reforms

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has revealed the Productivity Commission will within weeks release a discussion paper on the GST, which will fire the starting gun on WA’s fight to keep a fair share. Dr Chalmers again pledged that the Federal Government was “committed to the deal” protecting Western Australia’s slice of the national tax pool. The 2018 deal introduced a floor on GST payments so that no State would receive less than 75 per cent of an equal per person distribution. WA receives just $2600 per person from the tax, the lowest of any State. Tasmanians are handed $6300 each. “It’s important to us … that you get a fair share of the GST,” Dr Chalmers said in Perth on Wednesday. Yet he was not drawn on specific questions about other parts of the complex formula — including which States should be used as the national benchmark when carving up revenue. Those issues would be addressed by the Productivity Commission’s paper that will be released “hopefully quite soon” and definitely by the year’s end, he said. Asked how he would define a “fair share”, Dr Chalmers said that had been “legislated.” “We’ve made our views incredibly clear on every occasion that we support that deal,” he said at a workshop in Welshpool. It comes after Queensland’s Government on Tuesday tasked their own bureaucrats to review how the sales tax is carved up, claiming they were “being short-changed”. The Treasurer also sought to sharpen the contrast with the Coalition on environmental policy at a Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA breakfast. He urged WA industry to lobby the Senate for a swift deal on reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Ac, and warned abandoning net zero would take a “wrecking ball” to WA. The Federal Government wants to fast-track changes to the EPBC Act but needs to secure support from either the Coalition or the Greens. Dr Chalmers said WA would have “the most to gain” from the Government’s economic agenda. He said he might “push the friendship” by asking for a favour — urging the State’s industries to lobby in Canberra for a deal. “The message I had to the WA business community was that if they want to see a good, sensible, considered, heavily consulted outcome in the Senate next week, then I asked them, respectfully, to encourage, to urge and to pressure the Coalition and the Greens to do the right thing in the Senate,” Dr Chalmers said. An alliance of 26 business lobbyists yesterday wrote to Environment Minister Murray Watt backing “timely passage” of the changes. Yet the group — led by the Business Council of Australia — wants clearer definitions of what would constitute environmental damage. That comes after years of frustration that green tape was holding up major project developments including renewable energy, housing and critical minerals. Speeding up the reforms was a key decision from the Treasurer’s recent Economic Reform Summit. Dr Chalmers sought to contrast the Government’s EPBC changes with the Coalition’s recent move to drop net zero. “Western Australia has a lot to lose when it comes to the Coalition’s crazy idea of abandoning net zero,” he said. “They would swing a wrecking ball through the WA economy. They’d swing a wrecking ball through the energy market. “They would push power prices up, not down, and they would swing a wrecking ball through investor confidence and investor certainty as well.”