My cousin bought a Tesla Model X eight years ago for $280K. Now he can’t get $80K for it. $200K in 8 years. That’s $25K per year depreciation; or $500 per week 😳 The fastest way to lose money? Try selling your almost new EV theaustralian.com.au/life/mo…

🚨 Labor’s Senate “inquiry” into their destructive CGT changes is a total whitewash. Am I in or out. No information provided. Key critics and real investors/experts deliberately snubbed, no oral evidence allowed. Stacked with cheerleaders instead. This isn’t scrutiny. It’s a rigged rubber stamp for economic vandalism that attacks aspiration, startups, productive investment, retirees & charities. Scrap the CGT hike before it wrecks Australia’s future. #AxeTheCGTHike #AspirationMatters afr.com/politics/federal/cri…

The lost investment cannot be measured. Board decisions to invest elsewhere are invisible. The potential new businesses and start-ups that just don’t happen, or start overseas, are unknown. Australia is choosing a low growth, less prosperous future. What a shame for our kids.

An economist can write a good paper from this on the Laffer curve, how governments create black markets and the repercussions in funding criminal enterprise.

Great article in the AFR today from @profholden. The proposed changes to CGT are an act of self-harm which will incentivise businesses to stay small and grow slowly--the opposite of what we should be doing in a productivity crisis.

Emergency focus group sessions have been convened. The Labor budget spin has been recreated. Don’t buy it. These tax increases are still a brutal assault on investment, endeavour and entrepreneurship.

What current generations forget is that Australia had *zero* Capital Gains Tax from its founding through to September 1985 - the first-ever CGT was introduced by Labor under Hawke/Keating… New Zealand still has zero CGT. Socialists are trying to tax the private sector to transfer this income to the public sector to fund its out-of-control growth

Why would the CGT concessions be for tech only? Why not for all Aussie businesses? Why is tech more important than any other sector? And given the polling suggests voters clearly would have rejected these proposals at the last election, and there is patently no mandate to introduce them given the election was won on the many promises not to ever touch CGT and negative gearing, why not do the only honest and honourable thing - and put these radical changes to the test of an election? Either call one now or put them to the next election. Trying to railroad them home on the basis of a majority government that was voted in on the premise it would not make these changes is demonstrably non-democratic. It is also very unAustralian… At least give everyone a chance to vote on whether they want to overhaul the economy in this way. Even @DHughesy is up in arms about being rorted by the professional pollies who have never started a business or hired another Aussie in their lives

What's interesting about this backlash is that Albo & Chalmers do appear to be genuinely surprised by it. Which tells you that very few people in their circles come from private industry-- a massive self-sealing bubble. x.com/SkyNewsAust/status/205…

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.

"The Capital Gains Tax…if I had known they were going to do that, I wouldn’t have voted for them. I voted for Albo and Chalmers. They didn’t have a mandate for changing Capital Gains Tax. It’s now the highest in the world. No-one is going to want to invest in Australia. What the fuck are you doing?" @DHughesy

Emmo reveals the Labor socialist mindset; that many people cannot get ahead unless they take stuff from a few other people. Then he verbals the centre-right with a BS claim about locking people out of owning homes. There is not a more pro-property ownership, pro-human flourishing mindset than on the Right.

Breaking: Australia Institute and David Pocock start campaign to reduce beer tax. 🥳

Unfortunately, more and more Aussies are falling into the top marginal income tax bracket due to inflation and bracket creep. The highest 47 per cent tax threshold now kicks in at pre-tax income of $190,000, which is its lowest inflation-adjusted level in 20 years. If we had indexed these tax brackets to inflation since 2008-09, the top marginal income tax threshold would be a much higher $281,450. In trying to explain the cost of these capital gains tax changes, Labor assumed a future inflation rate of 3 per cent annually. Let's adopt that number to quantify the impact of bracket-creep. Back in 2008-09, only 1-in-50 Aussies paid the top marginal tax rate. Today, it is about 1-in-16 people. The bad news is that within 20 years, it will increase to 1-in-5 Aussies paying 47 per cent income tax. All of this begs the crucial question: what next? If, with literally — and deliberately — zero consultation, Labor is willing to ambush voters with these changes, what will it target in the future? The owner-occupied home, corporates and upper-income earners are obvious targets. All in the name of punishing prosperity and forcing all Aussies back to the mediocre mean. It is regressive socialism in stealth. Labor has framed this budget around fairness. Yet it is patently inequitable. It is a drive-by shooting to grab tax to pay for the one-quarter increase in the size of the public service since Anthony Albanese was elected prime minister in 2022. Even using its characteristically rosy forecasts, Labor predicts that the cost of Australia's extraordinarily bloated public service will blow out by $19.6 billion over the next four years. afr.com/markets/equity-marke…

Tech start-ups aren’t special. Every new business is a start-up. None of them should face a punitive tax on realisation of their toil, ideas and sacrifice. The government needs to confront its spending problem.

I did not realise they were taxing gross rather than net gains… AFR: Investors with diversified share portfolios making a mix of gains and losses compared to inflation could face tax rates of more than 100 per cent on real gains, due to the Albanese government not compensating investors for underperforming stocks. A former senior Treasury tax official and a hedge fund manager both warned that people with a diversified portfolio of shares could face tax rates 50 per cent higher than Treasury calculated… Chalmers’ office and Treasury were contacted for comment on Thursday about whether real losses would be indexed to inflation. Under another example, an investor buys shares in Coles and Woolworths, with one outperforming inflation and the other underperforming inflation. The overall real return is zero after inflation, but the investor would pay tax on the winning stock. If an investor instead bought an ETF of supermarkets with the same overall result, they would pay no tax. afr.com/policy/tax-and-super…

Australians will eventually realise we have a get-out-of-jail card to deal with high debt and to reduce taxes. It’s called mining. Let our resources off the leash.

It has never been more obvious that socialists don't actually care about working people, they just hate the rich.

One great product of this budget is that we are finally getting an honest elevated discourse about our confiscatory income tax levels.

What a manipulation of statistics. Housing stock ‘16-‘26 grew from 9.9M to 11.5M. That’s 1.6M new homes (16%) Population grew from 23.8M to 27.7M. Increase of 3.9M people. 2.5X more people than new dwellings. Further, 10% of dwellings are unoccupied - holiday homes, city pads and bolt holes owned by foreigners. The 1.6M new dwellings is reduced to 1.44M actually occupied. So the alternative facts are: Population is growing 2.7X faster than occupied new homes.