Vox pop: Will proposed tax cuts help your business?

Arthur Marinis, managing director, base2Services

Any reduction is a good reduction. However, reducing the company tax from 30 percent to 25 percent over 10 years won’t change budgets fast enough to have any major impact. 

The 10-year timeframe is too long for this reduction to help our company in any meaningful way. If this reform was focused on improving the grants on R&D, the result would be far greater. 

A five percent improvement on the R&D rebate would enable us to invest more. R&D is what the information technology industry does to innovate.

Leigh Parsons, managing director,State of Matter

For a growth-focused startup such as State of Matter, the majority of profit is reinvested back into the business by employing more staff. Other firms will similarly invest profit back into stock, machinery or R&D. 

Allowing SMEs to drive economic growth through access to their own capital delivers a far better ROI for Australia than its government spending a larger pool of tax revenue. 

Targeting these measures at SMEs is an especially effective tactic, because profits tend to be reinvested at the community level and are not diverted offshore. 

Large businesses also have access to tax minimisation strategies that SMEs don’t, so the effective tax rate for each type of firm pay is often similar. 

While I welcome the proposed cuts, the next step is to modify the way provisional tax is handled, which can place cash flow strain on SMEs.

Luke Alexander, director, Shine Solutions

Yes, the proposed tax cuts will help our business. While the tax cuts are not expected to make a significant impact, the savings generated from the tax cut will allow us to increase our investment in people and skills. 

To continue to grow the business, we need to build the skills needed to help our customers understand and leverage the advances being made in a fast-moving IT landscape. 

We expect to see the most benefit in the new and growing sectors of our business, such as machine learning, which requires a significant investment.