One Nation leader Pauline Hanson says her party will oppose the federal government’s capital gains tax reforms, arguing the changes will leave younger Australians worse off rather than making it easier to buy a home.
In a Facebook post, Hanson said negative gearing should remain available for up to two homes per person. Under the current arrangement, investors can deduct a net loss on a residential investment property from their overall income, reducing their annual tax bill.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers revealed in this month’s federal budget that the concession for property investors would be scaled back from next July as part of a broader package of tax changes.
The government says the reforms are designed to help younger Australians get into the housing market, but Hanson rejected that claim.
“The Labor government claims to be helping the younger generation, yet they’re taking away an investment strategy that has been used by generations before them.”
“We completely oppose the changes to CGT.”
Under Labor’s plan, from July 2027 negative gearing will apply only to newly built homes, superannuation funds and people who bought their properties before budget night.
The issue is emerging as a major political flashpoint as One Nation continues to build support in opinion polls, driven in large part by cost-of-living pressures. The party is also drawing increased backing from younger voters. It has recently secured seven new state MPs at the South Australian election and followed that with a strong win in the Farrer federal byelection.
While Labor is expected to pass the legislation through the House of Representatives, where it has the numbers, it will need support from either the Greens or the Coalition in the Senate.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has already pledged to fight the changes and repeal them if elected.
At the same time, the federal government says it will widen consultation on the tax reforms beyond tech start-ups to include businesses more broadly.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Treasury would consult across a wider group.
“Treasury are going about consulting not just in tech, but consulting COSBOA, for example, ACCI, the Tech Council,” he told reporters earlier this week.
“There’ll be a policy position paper for consultation produced as well after the first round of consultations. That was all foreshadowed there on budget night.”
The first legislation is due to be introduced to parliament on Thursday and links the tax measures to the tax cuts and $1000 standard deduction promised to workers. It will be debated before going to the Senate in June.
After that, and following further consultation, the government plans to introduce a second bill setting out the detail of how the reforms would work.
Albanese said that process followed the usual approach for tax reform and argued detailed consultation could not happen before the measures were announced.
“If you go back and have a look at tax reform and the way that it’s been implemented, this is the normal way,” he said.
“When you are doing changes to tax policy, that begins on budget night.
“What you cannot do is go out there and sit down with people and say from budget night, this change is definitely going to occur in detail, because there are implications of that. That’s called insider knowledge.
“Because changes are dated from, in capital gains and from negative gearing from budget night, that is why you can’t have the level of consultation that you want to see people coming forward in a common-sense way.”
The government has faced criticism from businesses that say they could be caught up in reforms intended to tackle intergenerational inequality in the housing market.
