Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Budget week is just around the corner, and for a lot of Australians, especially young people, this budget will say one simple thing. Whose side are we on? For Australians who are too busy juggling bills, kids and work to follow tax policy, let me put it in plain English. When someone sells an investment, like a rental property or shares, and makes a profit, they pay capital gains tax on that profit. But, if they've held that investment for more than a year, they only pay tax on half of the gain. That's the capital gains tax discount—a 50 per cent discount that should be halved.

If you make a profit from selling an investment, you should not automatically get half of it tax free. At a time of record housing stress, that generosity is simply not justified, because right now we have retail workers, early childhood educators and young tradies spending more than 30, 40 or even 50 per cent of their income just keeping a roof over their heads. Even medical graduates, our future doctors, are stressing about housing affordability. We need to ask whether our tax system should be giving the biggest breaks to billionaires like Gina Rinehart and other multiproperty investors while renters are taking second jobs and skipping meals to pay the rent.

Yes, we need to build more homes. Yes, we need productivity reform. But we cannot pretend that tax settings don't shape the housing market.

This government has a fat majority in the other house. It cannot blame the opposition. It cannot ignore the crossbench. If it believes in fairness, now is the time to prove it. Should the system keep rewarding property investors growing their wealth, or should it start backing the next generation? This budget is the moment to choose and a test of courage for the Labor government.