Rudd woos US financiers

The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants more international financiers to base operations in Australia.

He made his pitch in a speech he delivered in New York yesterday.

“… the Australian financial sector has one of the soundest regulatory frameworks in the world,” he said.

Mr Rudd said, too, that much of the spadework had already been done.

“The development of Australia’s financial services sector shows that world-class industries can emerge given the right policy settings,” he said.
“And it is worth reflecting for a moment on the global comparative advantages Australia’s financial services sector exhibits,” Mr Rudd added.

He reminded the US financial community, too, that Australia is in the same time zone as the East Asian hemisphere.

“Australia has strong institutional – and, increasingly, linguistic – linkages to financial markets across our region,” Mr Rudd said.
He noted, too, that an increasing number of Australian professionals are already “capable of operating in the principal languages of Asia.”

Mr Rudd said, also, that the market capitalisation of the Australian Stock Exchange, which is now more than one trillion US dollars, is also “about three times bigger than Singapore and around half that of the Hang Seng.”

And he said Australia’s funds management industry is the fourth-largest in the world with $1.3 trillion under management.”

That had resulted from superannuation reforms that the previous Labor government had introduced in the 1990s.

Mr Rudd reminded US investors, too, that his government plans to halve the withholding tax on distributions to non-resident investors in Australian managed funds to 15 per cent.

He said this would make Australia’s tax system “much more competitive with comparable tax regimes elsewhere.”

Mr Rudd noted, too, that Australia expects to have an agreement for mutual recognition between Australian and US securities regulatory regimes “by year’s end.”
This would be ” a global first for both the SEC and its Australian equivalent ASIC,” he said.