Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The housing market in this country is rigged; it's a scam. It's rigged against young people and against people trying to buy a home for themselves. One of the key parts of that rigging is the capital gains tax discount. The CGT discount is the most regressive, unfair tax break anywhere in the Commonwealth tax code. It is so regressive that 50 per cent of the benefit—half of the dollar benefit—of the capital gains tax discount goes to the top one per cent of income earners in this country. That is grossly unfair. It is skewed massively to people who are the highest income earners in this country. For reference, in the original stage 3 tax cuts, which themselves were grossly unfair, only seven per cent of the benefit of the original stage 3 tax cuts went to the top one per cent highest income earners in the country, and yet—because the Greens came into here day after day after day and campaigned against those tax cuts, and many thousands of Australians out in the community did the same—Labor, quite rightly, with no mandate from the Australian people, in the last parliament, came in, and they knocked the rough edges off those tax cuts and they made them less unfair. I say to the Labor Party: if you can do that to the stage 3 tax cuts with no mandate from the Australian people, you better get to work on the capital gains tax discount.

There is a massive scam in this country. Whether you're a sparkie or a nurse or a cleaner, if you work for a living, you will pay double the tax compared to a property speculator who makes the same amount of money by flipping investment properties. There is something cooked about a tax system that punishes work relative to property speculation, but that is where we find ourselves—people who make a living flipping investment properties pay about half the tax of someone who goes to work to earn the same amount in a year. It's a disgrace and it's unfair.