Mr Serious

Labor clearly can’t defend why its CGT changes extend beyond property if the intent is to remove tax incentives for property. But I’m seeing a new wave of defence being that a) they only apply to the ‘wealthy’ and b) ‘small businesses’ are exempt – so let me tell you why these are categorically wrong. • The ‘wealth’ data is fundamentally flawed: It’s based on single year transaction data, rather than lifetime earnings. About 90% of Aussie taxpayers earn under 135k per year, so when an investor sells a long-held asset, that single transaction for a single year pushes them into the ‘top 10%’. This doesn’t mean they’re in the top 10% of wealthiest Aussies – it simply means that for that specific year, they earned over 135k, which could be off the back of decades of earning much less per year. • The small business concessions aren’t indexed: The $2m threshold for annual turnover and $6m threshold for asset value haven’t increased for almost 20 years (a problem that extends to many of our taxes). This means modest family businesses are being dragged into a tax regime originally designed for much larger operations – specifically, where it was designed to exempt 95% of businesses entities in 2007, it now only exempts about 60% in 2026 (and rapidly shrinking). • The path to building wealth is being cut off: Financial independence is rarely achieved by earning a wage and spending it. For people to become comfortable or modestly wealthy, they generally need to save and invest the wages they earn. Enforcing a minimum 30% floor rate on all forms of capital gains, even for people whose income puts them below the 30% marginal tax bracket, makes it harder for wage earners to build wealth. The bottom line is that this budget suppresses aspiration and socio-economic mobility – and I don’t think that’s what Aussies voted for at the last election.