Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026

Mr LEESER (Berowra) (19:17): The people of Berowra are disappointed, deceived and angry about this government's unfair and dishonest tax policy. Let me state the central fact plainly. Labor took these taxes to the 2019 election and was defeated on them.

Bill Shorten, the then Labor leader, was so confident of his success in that election he told Arnold Schwarzenegger he was going to be the next prime minister. But then people got a hold of this tax policy, and they saw what a dog of a policy it is. The present prime minister promised repeatedly on the record he would not introduce these taxes.

When asked directly, he said: Yes, how hard is it, for the 50th time? More than 50 times he made the promise, and then he turned around and broke every single one of those commitments. When John Howard changed a major tax policy, he took it to the people first.

This prime minister is too scared to do that because he knows he would get the same answer that Labor got in 2019. Instead, he misled the Australian people and is now governing through the deception as if it never happened. The crime is never the problem; it's always the cover up.

The Australian people aren't fooled. There's a Billy Joel lyric that captures the mood—and, unlike my friend the shadow Treasurer, I'm not going to sing! He says: 'But I don't want some pretty face to tell me pretty lies.

Honesty is such a lonely word and mostly what I need from you.' And that's the message the people of Berowra have for a prime minister who has deliberately deceived them. The coalition opposes schedules 1 and 2, the CGT and negative gearing changes, and will fight these toxic taxes tooth and nail. And a coalition government will repeal them.

This is the highest taxing government in Australia's history: $50 billion in higher taxes, $273 billion Australians didn't vote for. Debt is heading to $1.25 trillion. Today's debt is tomorrow's taxes, and the next generation is being handed the bill.

Strip away the rhetoric and what we have is a death tax, a tax on family savings, a tax on renters, a tax on first home buyers, a tax on small businesses and a tax on entrepreneurs—the engine room of the Australian economy. Labor can't manage money and they're coming after yours. In the weeks since budget night I've listened to people who trusted this government to get the basics right: to ease the cost of living; to support those who plan carefully for the long term; and to provide incentives to take risks, to employ people and to get ahead.

Their hopes have been dashed. What I heard from the detailed survey of nearly 2,000 in my community should trouble every member in this parliament. The government's own budget papers admit that their tax changes will result in 35,000 fewer homes being built over the next decade.

That isn't our number; it's their number. When you tax something, you get less of it. That's not ideology; it's economics 101.

The more you tax housing investment the less housing you get, and this government has decided that's the price young Australians should pay. On rents, the government's own budget papers admit that its tax changes will increase rents. An independent economist suggests that rents could rise significantly in our major cities.

Shane from Cherrybrook put it clearly. He said that, for younger Australians trying to buy their first home, non-property investment was one of the few remaining paths to building deposit wealth, but these tax changes have closed the door. Phoebe is a public schoolteacher.

She's not wealthy. She doesn't travel overseas for holidays. She's someone who made careful investment decisions under the existing rules.

She wrote to me with a concern not for herself but for the next generation. She said that the two strategies so many people who want to save for a house are using—rent-vesting and shares—are no now so highly taxed they're barely worth pursuing. Phoebe made a further point that every housing economist already knows but that this government refuses to act on: We need more supply.

We need more apartments genuinely designed for families, not studios and one-bedders. That's the path forward, not demand-side tinkering that inflates prices for the very buyers it claims to help. Nicole, from Dural, asked a question, and I can't improve on it: how does penalising mum-and-dad investors who own one or two properties help younger people get into the market?

And she raised the other side of the equation: fewer investment properties means fewer places for people to rent. This government can't simultaneously claim to be helping renters and have punishing policies that shrink the pool of rental housing available to them.' Our community survey confirmed that this concern is broadly shared. Sixty-five per cent of respondents believe that Labor's proposed changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing will make it harder for Australians to invest, save and build for the future.

FSC data confirms that aggressive investors, typically younger Australians aged around 35, will be hit hardest by the CGT changes. Young Australians with the most ambition have the biggest target on their backs. Small business insolvencies are running at eight closures every business hour.

The Treasurer is surveying the damage his own policies are causing and declaring victory. The government is coming for small business with a 47 per cent stake claim. They've done none of the work, taken none of the risk, but they want nearly half of the business.

The Prime Minister is that person in every group assignment who never shows up but expects the same grade at the end. Small business isn't just the backbone of the economy. For many owners, it's their retirement savings, their family legacy and the first job for the kids in the community.

The government isn't just taxing business; it's taxing a life's work. Alan from Galston, with 36 years of lived experience, captured this. He and his wife started their business with one assumption: that they could one day sell it and retire.

That's not greed; that's planning. This budget has shifted the ground beneath them at precisely the moment they were preparing to step off it. Robert from Pennant Hills puts it plainly: 'This budget is political spin.

It adds complexity, does nothing for productivity and, above all, removes certainty, the lifeblood of business confidence. When a government sacrifices certainty for political positioning, it isn't managing the economy, it's gambling with it.' The Albanese government has buried a 30 per cent death tax in these papers, deliberately hidden, hoping no-one would find it.

The Prime Minister was asked questions directly in question time to rule out a death tax, and he wouldn't. We now know why. He couldn't rule it out because he'd already announced one.

This is a government that told untruths more than 50 times before the election about not introducing new taxes on homes, on rentals, on investments and on family savings and then tried to sneak a death tax through on top of it all. The deception is breathtaking. This government has tried to frame its trust tax as a technical question.

It's not. It's a question of principle. It's a question of whether this government can be trusted to honour the assurances it gives to Australian families who are trying to do the right thing.

Our survey put the question directly: do you support or oppose Labor's proposed minimum 30 per cent tax rate on discretionary trusts? Opposition won by a significant margin: 67 per cent. And when asked whether these proposed changes amount to a death tax by stealth, 65 per cent agreed.

These are not the responses of tax avoiders; they're the responses of families who structured their affairs carefully, in good faith and under the rules as they existed. I recently met with a family from my electorate who run a well-established local business. After our meeting, they followed up in writing.

I want to bring their words into this chamber. They'd gone to their accountant, following the government's proposed changes. His advice was measured.

Their current structure is as well-positioned as it can be, but distributing funds from these structures is now materially less tax-effective than it was. For a family business like theirs, that affects decisions around reinvestment, around remuneration and around the generational transition of the business that is actively, right now, underway. Think about what that means in practice: a family that has spent decades building something is now trying to pass it to the next generation, and, at precisely the moment that that transition is happening, the government is changing the rules.

Judy from North Epping said that these changes will negatively affect Australians who've worked hard all their lives to provide for their families and themselves in retirement—people who find the retirement they'd planned now made much harder by a government that has moved the goalposts. Nicole from Dural put a human face on what these structures actually are.

She and her husband bought a property through their trust, so that their child—who has a disability and can never earn enough to keep up with the rent or mortgage—would have somewhere to live when they're gone. That's not a tax lurk; that's a parent's love, translated into a legal structure. And this government's changes effectively impose what Nicole rightly calls a death tax on that arrangement.

I ask every government member to sit with that for a moment. Tony from Cherrybrook is equally clear: these changes are a breach of promise and will drive investment offshore. These families are not asking for a special exemption; they're asking to be heard.

And I make that commitment every day—that I will hear them, I will stand up for them and I will take their concerns to this parliament. Nearly 2,000 residents, as I say, took time to complete the survey—a number that speaks about how much is truly at stake. The response has cut across all age groups, property owners and renters, business owners and employees.

Of the 18 per cent who identified as small-business owners, almost all expressed serious concerns. Of the 66 per cent who own shares, the vast majority believe that their investments will be materially worse off. Of the 37 per cent who own investment properties, the message was the same.

I should say again: Berowra is the electorate with the third-highest number of people in the country that have taken advantage of the negative gearing arrangements, in order for people to build wealth. Our survey identified the groups most affected by these changes: family trusts, with 61 per cent of respondents; small businesses, at 51 per cent; property investors, at 60 per cent; retirees, at 44 per cent; and even young investors, at 42 per cent.

These people are the backbone of communities like Berowra's. But what stayed with me was not the statistics. It was the loss of confidence that hard work would be rewarded, that rules wouldn't change without warning and that government was competent at the basics.

As one small-business owner wrote: 'I don't expect the government to solve all my problems. I just want them to stop making new ones.' A nurse who owns a home in Berowra Heights wrote to me: 'I did everything right. I worked hard, I saved, I bought a house.

Now I feel like I'm going backwards.' And she isn't wrong. Frank from Normanhurst said it plainly. He said: 'This government is not just damaging household finances.

It's damaging morale.' And that's why this set of tax laws that are before the parliament need to be opposed. The people of Berowra deserve so much better. They deserve a government that understands that a discretionary trust is not a tax lurk; it's a legitimate structure for families like Nicole's to secure a child's future.

It's a legitimate structure for Alan, who built a business over 36 years, on the promise he could retire from it; and for Judy from North Epping, who worked hard all her life, only to find the rules changed at the final hour. That's a betrayal of trust, and I won't let it go untested. These people deserve a genuine housing plan—not tax changes that close investment pathways that first home buyers were using; not tax changes that drive up rents and deliver 35,000 fewer homes, by the government's own reckoning.

They deserve a government that backs small business—one that understands, as Alan from Galston does, that building a business over decades and selling it to retire isn't greed; it's actually the Australian dream. They deserve the certainty that Robert from Pennant Hills identifies as the lifeblood of confidence. And they deserve a government that understands what Frank from Normanhurst, what Judy from North Epping, what Robert from Pennant Hills and what nearly 2,000 residents of my electorate took time to say: that confidence matters—that, when government keeps breaking the compact with the people who plan, who save and who build, the damage goes well beyond the hip pocket.

It goes to the heart of what this country is supposed to be. This is a series of bad-faith measures. They are an assault on aspiration.

They pull up the ladder of opportunity from young Australians before they get the first foot on the rung. This isn't intergenerational fairness; it's intergenerational fraud.