Australia, we need to talk about revenue. Thanks to the business lobby, "tax reform" in Australia has become synonymous with cutting taxes, despite Australia being one of the lowest taxing countries in the developed world.

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If Australia collected the same level of revenue from taxation as the OECD average, similar to Canada or the United Kingdom, we would raise more than $100 billion extra each year. That's more than the combined cost of Medicare, Jobseeker, the Child Care Subsidy, the army and the navy put together.

How much better would Australia's healthcare system be if the federal government had an additional $140 billion to spend each year? Investing in public services can raise people's living standards and ease cost-of-living pressures. But too often Australia's economic debate only focuses on the need to cut public spending and services and completely ignores the other side of the equation: revenue.

On Wednesday, the Australia Institute will host the 2026 Revenue Summit, where experts will gather to have a wide-ranging discussion about the options for raising more revenue in Australia.

As Australia Institute co-chief executive Richard Denniss says, Australia is a rich country, and we can afford to do anything we want, but not everything we want - but if we raised more revenue, governments could certainly deliver a hell of a lot more for the public than they can now.

In past years, the Revenue Summit has been at the forefront of driving the national tax reform debate, exploring how Scott Morrison's Stage 3 tax cuts could be reformed to deliver better, fairer tax cuts; how reforming the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing would help make housing more affordable; and how the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax is so broken that the federal government collects more money from the beer excise than from the PRRT, and how to fix it.

Raising revenue gives Australians more and better options. Raising more money from tax doesn't mean taxing ordinary Australians more. To give just one example, Australia could introduce a 25 per cent tax on gas exports and raise an additional $17 billion a year........

© Canberra Times