Andrew spoke on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, addressing the changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax and their impacts on the housing crisis in particular. You can watch his speech or read an excerpt below:
“Our country is slowly flipping from a country of homeowners to a country of renters, and that’s a terribly sad thing to observe and to live through. You know, you’ve only got to go back two or maybe three decades, and the normal course of events was that a normal sort of person, a regular Joe—he or she—would get a job, work hard, save up a house deposit and could afford to buy a modest cottage for the family to grow up in. Then they might upgrade it and sell, to move up to something grander, a decade or a couple of decades later, when they could afford it.
I don’t want to go back to the white picket fence of John Howard, but I do want to go back to a day when a regular person had it within their capacity to own their own home. But, at some point during the last two or three decades, especially in the last half a dozen years or so, housing stopped being a fundamental human right in this country and became an investment product: in some ways, no better or worse than a parcel of shares or whatever someone might invest in—maybe cryptocurrency, these days. So no longer was a home a fundamental human right and something that regular people could aspire to and achieve; it became an investment product, for those who could afford to, to try and make a buck from.
I don’t criticise the people who have made a buck, and I’ve traded a few houses myself over the years. What I am criticising, though, is the succession of governments, over decades, that quite deliberately put in place the policy settings to turn homes into investments and to take away that fundamental human right. One, of course, was negative gearing. In fact, it wasn’t just the introduction of negative gearing; I think the thing that made negative gearing worse was the change that allowed property owners to deduct property costs against their gross income, including their personal salary. That change, from when you could only deduct against the costs of the property, was, I think, a very significant and a very detrimental change in turning property from a human right into an investment.
Then there’s capital gains tax. Of course you should pay some sort of capital gains tax when you have a substantial capital gain. The decision to halve the capital gains tax after 12 months might have been well intentioned, but I’m hard pressed to find one decent economist, one good economist, in this country who thinks that the halving of the capital gains tax—that so-called discount—was a good idea. You can see where I’m going with this, Deputy Speaker. I obviously support—in fact, I applaud—the government for deciding to do something about the tax arrangements regarding residential property. I will support the bill, and I will do it with honesty, because I went to the last election campaigning for tax reform of residential property. So I feel quite pure about this. I don’t feel that I’m letting my community down by supporting this bill
But it does bring me to the criticism of the government by the opposition and others that they went to the election promising not to do this. Well, do you know what? To some degree I’ll associate myself with the opposition’s criticism here, because this is one of the biggest tax reforms that I can think of—certainly in my adult lifetime—and it would be proper process for something this big to have been taken to the election. So, although I will support it and I won’t feel guilty about doing that, because I campaigned on such a reform, I would say to the government: you should have taken it to the election. I’d say to the opposition: when you have big reforms in the future, take it to the election, because, whether it be Tony Abbott reneging on his promises before and after the 2013 election or the current government reneging on its promises before last year’s election, all it does is feed that cynicism about the political class in the community. It’s no wonder emerging parties are enjoying record popularity, because the old political class is letting the community down and the community want to ventilate that dissatisfaction and that displeasure. So it feeds into that…”