One of the most senior business figures in the country has put her hand up for a higher personal tax bill. Dame Therese Walsh, who chairs both ASB Bank and Air New Zealand, told RNZ’s 30 with Guyon Espiner that she is comfortable contributing more of her income to the state, because she has been one of the winners in the New Zealand economy and she thinks the system should reflect that.
“I am happy to pay a higher tax rate because I earn more than the average Kiwi,” Walsh told Espiner in the first episode of the new season of the podcast, which went live in the early hours of Wednesday morning. “I think I should contribute more, and that’s what I’m happy to do.”
It is an unusual line for the chair of one of the country’s four largest banks and its flag carrier airline to take in public, and one that lands at a moment when the gap between corporate balance sheets and household budgets has become a routine political flashpoint. ASB recently reported a half-year cash net profit of 719 million dollars. Air New Zealand has been guiding the market to a full-year loss of up to 390 million dollars as the Iran war pushes jet fuel prices to between US$160 and US$230 a barrel and forces the airline to trim another 4 percent of its schedule for May and June.
Walsh, who is also a former senior executive for the 2011 Rugby World Cup and the 2015 Cricket World Cup, framed her comments as a personal position rather than a board view. “I’ve had a great career, I can pay my bills, I own my home, and I want a tax system that lifts all New Zealanders up, that’s what I want,” she told Espiner.
She was less willing to nail her colours to any specific reform. Asked whether she backed a capital gains tax, Walsh declined to give a yes or no answer, telling Espiner that “quick superficial answers actually aren’t that helpful” and that the country needed to look at the whole tax system rather than pick at individual settings in isolation. Her position is that the design of the system matters at least as much as the headline rates, and that a piecemeal debate about one tax at a time tends to produce poor policy.
Walsh used the same interview to defend the profitability of her bank. She pointed out that ASB employs several thousand New Zealanders, pays a substantial amount of corporate tax, and lends to a large share of Kiwi households and small businesses. She has made similar arguments to the Finance and Expenditure Committee in the past, telling MPs that ASB’s return on equity of about 12.5 percent was in line with what other large New Zealand listed companies were earning, and warning that if the major Australian-owned banks were squeezed too hard the country could end up with global technology firms taking over core banking functions instead.
The Walsh interview lands in the middle of a politically tender week for tax in New Zealand. The Reserve Bank is expected to leave the Official Cash Rate on hold at 2.25 percent later today, even as headline inflation is forecast to push above 4 percent in the June quarter on the back of the Middle East fuel shock. Households are absorbing higher petrol, food and shipping costs at the same time as wage growth is slowing, and any conversation about who pays for public services tends to sharpen in that environment.
Walsh’s framing of the issue is also notably personal. She told Espiner that her own background, including a family loss earlier in her career and a small lottery win that she has spoken about in earlier interviews with the New Zealand Herald, shaped how she thinks about luck, opportunity and the role of the state. She acknowledged that she had at times considered running for Parliament, but said that ship had probably sailed.
It is also a reminder that not every voice in the corporate sector is reading from the same script. The recent Inland Revenue work on high-wealth individuals showed that the country’s wealthiest families pay an effective tax rate of about half that of an average wage earner once capital gains and untaxed company earnings are taken into account. A senior bank and airline chair publicly accepting that someone in her position should pay more, even without endorsing a specific instrument, is the kind of statement that gives political cover to a future government wanting to revisit the settings.
Walsh also offered a more sober assessment of Wellington, where ASB and Air New Zealand both have a substantial footprint. She told Espiner that the capital had “got lost” between Auckland’s continued growth and Christchurch’s post-earthquake rebuild, and that the city needed a clearer economic story of its own. She did not propose a fix, but the comment is likely to be picked up by the city’s business community at a time when the central government is also reviewing what to do with surplus office space and the public service headcount.
The full interview is available on the RNZ website and the 30 with Guyon Espiner podcast feed.
Do you think the New Zealand tax system asks enough of high earners, or are profitable companies like ASB already paying their share? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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