The mandate story on the negative gearing and CGT changes is worth telling in full, because the history makes it damning.
2016: Labor takes negative gearing and CGT reform to the election. Loses.
2019: Labor takes the same reform back to the election. Loses the unloseable one. Drops 17 seats. And this is the part people forget, the policy actually had majority public support at the time. They lost anyway. Their own campaign review blamed the size and complexity of the tax agenda.
2021: Laborâs shadow cabinet formally dumps it. Official line: âmaintain the existing regimes for negative gearing and capital gains tax.â
2022: Labor wins, having explicitly abandoned the policy.
Then the 2025 campaign. 9 April 2025, Albanese is asked to rule out any changes to negative gearing and CGT if re-elected.
âYes. How hard is it? For the 50th time.â
For the 50th time. They didnât run on it. They buried it, because it had already cost them two elections.
3 May 2025: Labor wins 94 of 150 seats. A landslide on paper. But the primary vote was 34.6%. Roughly 5 million of 15 million first preferences were Labor. Two-thirds of the seats on a third of the vote, delivered by preferences and the worst Coalition result since 1944.
August 2025, after the win: âThe only tax policy weâre implementing is the one we took to the election.â
12 May 2026: the budget changes negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.
Labor knew this policy was electoral poison. It cost them 2016. It cost them 2019, even with majority support behind it. So they dumped it, ruled it out about âfifty timesâ, won on that promise with a 34.6% primary vote, and then implemented it anyway, twelve months later.
You can support the reform on its merits and still see exactly what happened here. A structural change to housing taxation, twice rejected at the ballot box, was delivered without ever being put to voters, by a government that won its seats by promising not to do it.
The first time anyone gets to vote on this policy as government policy will be 2028. After itâs law.
Thatâs not a mandate. Thatâs a 34.6% primary vote and 94 seats being used to do the thing they spent a decade learning they could never get voters to agree to.
#auspol
Right now, it's too tough to buy your first home.
Weâre fixing that by changing negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks to give first home buyers a fair go.