Victoria is the perfect size to run itself. Why are we sending money to Canberra, getting less back, and pretending like we need a big federal government? Let’s change it. #auspol #springst

I love Claude. I was excited by Fable. But we can’t rely on foreign owned brilliance. We need to have Australian AI - and proper competitive federalism and deregulated low tax markets would help immensely. We can’t forever rent things from the world.

The position these ppl are in has nothing to do with how much tax “wealthier” ppl pay and a lot to do with a social contract that pushes them into high debt - esp the nurse - and rewards unproductive bureaucratic (public and private) jobs.

While technocrats and academics pontificate the merits of high CGT with indexation versus a lower CGT without indexation, none seem to want to address the root cause of the anomaly - our obscenely high 47% top marginal rate. Reduce that to <35% (30% better) then the debate ends.

There’s 2 ways to do good tax reform: lower overall tax take and do things that limit the need for tax professionals be they private practitioners or bureaucrats. I’m an avowed small gov / low tax guy. What’s in the Budget is good reform.

We need all tax rates to coalesce around 30% - that's the next big target. Forget about CGT etc. That's the game. For those keen on 20 - it's unrealistic. 30 is achievable within most ppls' lives. Thresholds and incremental decreases are the interim game.

This government over-taxes and over-spends. Raising taxes again is bad. But flattening average tax rates across different forms of income is good policy: it’s efficient and stops tax driving decisions. The next step is lower, flatter marginal rates.

This is a good Budget on structural reform. Things should be taxed the same. The tax system shouldn’t be used for incentives or disincentives; they distort decisions and make capital lazy. The right’s task now is simple: cut rates and reduce total tax take.

If this is true it’s an absolute disgrace. Constant trading away of competition integrity for commercial gain will eventually completely destroy people’s faith in and love of the sport. 💔😔

Just so true. Tax “work” - from which I’ve made a living - is unproductive. The need for an illusion of fairness makes a lot of ppl a lot of money.

I need to rant about something because I keep seeing the same brain-dead take over and over again. "AI is going to take all our jobs." No. No it is not. AI is not going to make people work less. It's going to make people work MORE. I know this because I'm living it. Right now. Today. I am working more hours than I have at any point in my life. Not because I have to. Because I literally cannot stop. I'm doing it voluntarily. Happily. Obsessively. This is also true of everyone I know that is deeply involved in AI. When you sit down and realize you can go from idea to execution in HOURS with no dependencies on anyone else — no designer queue, no engineering sprint, no "let's circle back next week" — your brain breaks in the best possible way. You just keep going. You build one thing. It works. You build the next thing. That works too?! And suddenly it's midnight and you don't care because you just brought five ideas to life that would've taken you 3 MONTHS six months ago. Every builder I know is experiencing this same addiction right now. We're all sleeping less and producing more and enjoying every second of it. The value of one hour of human input has gone up by an order of magnitude. So what happens when your input becomes 10x more valuable? You don't do less of it. You do WAY more. Because the incentives are insane. The "AI takes jobs" crowd is making the same mistake people have made with every single technology in history. They're assuming there's a fixed pie of work. There isn't. There never was. The pie grows. It always grows. And AI is about to make it grow faster than anything we've ever seen. More work. More jobs. More builders. More opportunities. More humans doing more ambitious things than they ever thought possible. This is the beginning of the most productive era in human history and most people are too busy doom-scrolling to notice. Bookmark this.

Pathetic mate…you know what’s going on here.

Housing debates in Australia have become moralised. Investors vs first-home buyers. Scrap negative gearing. Change CGT. Rezone more land. Supply matters. Tax settings matter. But we rarely examine the upstream incentives we’ve built over the past five decades. Across that period we progressively normalised university as the default pathway for capable young people. Workforce entry shifted later. Student debt became standard. Credential requirements expanded. That delayed wealth formation at scale. Many trades and vocational pathways still produce strong incomes, often earlier. But the cultural hierarchy increasingly privileged academic credentials. Later earning years plus debt compress deposit windows. Over the same decades, universities evolved into major export businesses reliant on international enrolments and migration-linked growth. That created structural incentives to expand the degree pipeline and population intake. We also increased migration without developing a clear, explicit beneficiary-pays mechanism for the housing and infrastructure load that follows. Gains are often concentrated. Costs are diffuse. So we have later workforce entry, higher early-life debt, sustained population growth, and then a political debate that focuses almost entirely on investors and tax concessions. Housing affordability is partly a supply issue. It is also the product of long-term incentive design. If we won’t examine education settings, migration pricing, tax structure, and cultural defaults together, we’ll keep treating symptoms instead of system architecture.

Victoria is - the highest taxing state, - the most indebted state, - pays the biggest interest bill, - gets less back from the Cth than it contributes (inc on infrastructure). Surely some people care about this?

Removing the discount for capital gains tax would reduce construction and increase rents by 1.3%. In my opinion that is the best, most credible estimate, by Cho, Li and Uren. It is similar to estimates by Deloitte (2019), CIE (2017) and Singh et al (2025). onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…

Yes, this is possible if we got rid off zoning and half the bloated bureaucracy!

The housing crisis is really just another cost of government crisis. It’s hurting families trying to buy their first home and the small builders trying to provide them. At a federal level, mass immigration is putting pressure on demand, and state and local zoning restrictions and regulations are stopping supply from keeping up. The Libertarian Party has policies to address these problems, but one often overlooked factor is the massive tax and regulation burden. For a new four-bedroom house and land package in Sydney’s suburbs, you’d be looking at $1,200,000 or more. How much of that went straight to tax and government fees? - Infrastructure levies and developer contributions: $70,000 - GST baked into construction and the sale: $110,000 - Stamp duty on the land (paid by the builder when they bought the site): $35,000 - Payroll tax, superannuation, income tax & corporate tax on the tradies, suppliers and builder’s slim margin: $90,000 - Council fees, planning approvals, land tax, licensing & compliance red tape: $40,000 - Biodiversity offsets: $10,000 - Additional costs from net zero energy efficiency mandates: $10,000 Total direct taxes and government fees from your $1,200,000 are over $365,000, and that’s before the buyer pays another $48,000 in stamp duty on top. Independent studies shows that when you include all the endless delays due to red tape, compliance and overheads, it’s closer to 49%. Nearly $590,000 going straight to the government per new Sydney home. So how dare they talk about housing affordability! Next time you’re looking at a new home, remember that a huge chunk of that price isn’t going to the land, the bricks, the tradies or the builder trying to keep the project alive. It’s funding the big fat state. If I’m elected to NSW Parliament next year I’ll stand up for free markets and free families by smashing this tax burden and slashing the red tape so more families can actually afford a home of their own. @LibertariansNSW

Rents would become a lot more affordable if we did this.

Remember CGT is a tax and imposing taxes - and increasing them - makes things more expensive not less expensive. Tell me how I’m wrong.