Imposing the goods and services tax on goods bought on overseas websites will be on the agenda when Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey meets his state and territory counterparts this week.

Retailers have been warning for years that the absence of a tax on imported goods worth less than $1,000 has been seriously denting business.

They say the change will boost jobs and could net the Government $1 billion of extra revenue each year.

Federal Treasury has been asked to examine ways to charge the GST on imported goods worth less than $1,000, which are currently excluded by the low-value threshold.

It will report back to the treasurers on the options available.

A 2011 report from the Productivity Commission said the threshold should only be lowered if the revenue from the change exceeds the costs.

Russell Zimmerman from the Australian Retailers' Association thinks that can be achieved - if the threshold is reduced to as low as $30.

"The Government, through the Productivity Commission Report, was told that if the threshold was lowered to $100 that there would be in excess of $500 million worth of tax collected," Mr Zimmerman said.

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"However, we believe that if the threshold was lowered to around about the $30 mark, collection of goods and services tax would be in excess of $1 billion."

Mr Zimmerman says the potential benefit for retailers through increased domestic sales is less clear.

John Daley from the Grattan Institute values the budget improvement of the low-value threshold change at $500 million to $600 million a year.

"That will doubtless help, but when your ongoing budget deficit is in the order of $30 billion, you need an awful lot of things that look like that," Mr Daley said.

"Now by comparison, if you broaden the GST to cover fresh food, health and education - private spending on health and education - that increases your tax take by $13 billion."

Broadening the GST to a bigger range of products is just one of the suggestions in a new Grattan Institute report.

Mr Daley admits some of the suggestions, such as imposing a capital gains tax on owner-occupied housing, could have negative social consequences.

But he says others simply make sense, such as increasing the age at which people can start accessing the pension and their superannuation to 70.

He says that change will earn the Government an extra $12 billion a year, and scrapping super contribution tax concessions for older Australians will save $3 billion.

The report says indexing the fuel excise to inflation would raise $3 billion a year, while banning negative gearing would also raise $3 billion.

But Mr Daley is not overly optimistic about some of the more politically sensitive proposals taken up by the new Federal Government, despite the need to pay for policies such as the paid parental leave scheme and the disability insurance scheme.

"That's what we're hoping with this report will help to achieve: to start people thinking about if we're serious about bringing our budgets back into surplus, these are the kinds of things that we are going to have to do - and all of them will be politically painful," he said.