Project Victoria

Labor’s new capital gains tax of up to 46% to 47%, which is far and away the highest in the world, hammers all businesses, including small companies, harder the more successful they become. By applying the most expensive CGT regime in the world, Labor is taking almost half of the upside of any successful firm, encouraging owners and executives who own shares in the business to look at relocating overseas. The question, however, is how many small businesses will actually pay this tax in practice. We prepared the following simulation to highlight the impact. We took the long-term 20 year returns from Cambridge Associates for smaller venture capital companies, which grow by 12.2% pa. We adopted the ASX equity market volatility of 15% pa, which would understate the true volatility of small firms (and thus lead to a lower proportion of very high growth companies paying 46-47% tax in our analysis). We then ran a simulation to estimate the proportion of businesses paying CGT of more than 40%. We find that within 10 years more than half of all Aussie small businesses will be hammered by CGT over 40%, which rises to 78% of all small businesses by 20 years... By giving Australia the most uncompetitive business valuation tax in the world, this policy will crush innovation, entrepreneurship, spending, productivity, growth and our global competitiveness. We already have among the lowest productivity growth rates in the world: by reducing productivity further, we could raise the cost of living, inflation, and interest rates.