Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026
Mrs McINTOSH (Lindsay) (10:18): No-one voted for these taxes. Before the election, the Prime Minister promised more than 50 times he would not introduce them, yet here we are. The Albanese Labor government's budget changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing demonstrate their inclination to tax ambition first and justify later.
This is a budget of broken promises that takes a wrecking ball to the Australian dream and pulls the ladder of opportunity up on the next generation. Labor is reaching deeper into the pockets of millions of hardworking Australians because it cannot manage the nation's finances. The Albanese Labor government has won an award for something, though.
It is now the highest taxing government in Australian history. Well done! The budget locks in $50 billion in higher taxes, and the Prime Minister has now confirmed $273 billion in taxes Australians never voted for.
Debt is heading towards $1.25 trillion. The interest bill is running at around $80,000 a minute, and today's debt is tomorrow's tax bill, a bill handed to the next generation. The Albanese Labor government is selling this as 'intergenerational fairness', as if it is something to be proud of.
It's not intergenerational fairness; it is intergenerational fraud. There is nothing fair about making young Australians pay for the consequences of government failure. Every element of this package targets aspiration It targets Australians trying to get ahead—the self-starters, the risk-takers and the people building businesses, saving deposits and investing for the future.
It's as if Labor thinks that we just forget. In 2019, Labor went to the Australian people with sweeping tax changes, slashing the capital gains tax discount and abolishing negative gearing. They expected applause.
But Australians overwhelmingly rejected that and they were not elected. At the 2022 election they stayed quiet. The Prime Minister preached to all Australians that he was a man of his word, that his word was 'his bond' and that there were 'no taxes to see here'.
At the 2025 election the Prime Minister repeated this promise more than 50 times and said that an Albanese Labor government would not impose changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax. Fast forward to 2026 and the Prime Minister has done the unthinkable: he has gone back on his word. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer say that times have changed and they need to respond to a changing environment.
That's wrong, Prime Minister. You were elected on a promise of no changes to CGT and no changes to negative gearing. Australians will not forget and they will take this as a stark reminder that your word and your bond mean absolutely nothing.
Australians instinctively understand something this government still refuses to learn. If you punish aspiration, people stop aspiring. And when you punish the people who build things—the people who wire our homes, pour our slabs, fix our pipes and train the next generation—you don't hurt the rich.
You hollow out the backbone of communities like mine in Lindsay. As of 30 June 2025 there were more than 2.7 million actively trading businesses in Australia. This budget practically taunts them— work harder, risk more, build something extraordinary then pay for daring to dream.
What does that do to confidence? What does that do to the apprentice told to dream big only to learn the system punishes dreamers. What does that do to the tradie who's put in a lifetime of work, ready to pass the tools on, only to find the finish line has been pushed further away?
Australians aren't asking for special treatment; they're asking for a fair go. Nowhere is Labor's assault on aspiration more obvious than in housing. The government's own budget papers show 35,000 fewer homes will be built.
The Real Estate Institute of Australia's modelling lands in the same place: 33,000 fewer new builds. These two different sources tell one story—fewer homes, higher rents, deeper pain. The Real Estate Institute of Australia has warned that Labor's CGT changes will worsen housing shortages and push rents even higher.
New modelling from the REIA, Master Builders Australia and the Property Council shows the budget's housing measures would push rents up by $9 a week, a 350 per cent increase on the budget's own forecasts; reduce new housing supply by 8,700 homes; cut GDP by $864 million; and cost more than 3,800 construction jobs. When you tax something, you get less of it. That's Economics 101.
In Penrith city, 30.2 per cent of rental households were already paying $450 or more per week at the last census. The average rent is now $600. Regentville had 45 per cent of households paying more than a third of their income on rent.
These aren't just numbers; they're people—the single mum working two jobs and watching half her pay disappear on her rent, the young couple delaying having a baby because they can't afford a bigger place, the pensioner skipping heat in winter to keep a roof overhead. Mortgage stress is rising too. If the Reserve Bank were to lift the cash rate next week, 1.57 million mortgage holders would be pushed into the danger zone, an increase of 104,000.
The share of mortgage holders at risk of mortgage stress would rise to 30.7 per cent, edging close to the GFC peak of 35.6 per cent. Casula in Western Sydney has the highest arrears. One in 40 mortgaged homeowners is falling behind.
Cambridge Gardens in my electorate is not far behind that. For young Australians trying to save a deposit, the picture is even bleaker. Labor's five per cent deposit scheme is supposed to help young people into homes sooner, yet families now fear that a single rate rise or even a modest downturn could push them into negative equity.
With analysts warning of property dips of up to 10 per cent under this budget, that fear isn't hypothetical; it is a red flag waving furiously. According to the first home buyers dashboard, 2,912 homes have been purchased under the scheme. In my electorate, that's hundreds of families—many of them young, many of them first generation homeowners—now lying awake at night wondering whether the home they fought so hard to buy could be worth less than the debt attached to it.
For many Australians, property is their single biggest financial asset, and most investors are not wealthy—71 per cent own just one investment property; 19 per cent own two. They're everyday Australians trying to build a nest egg, so they don't end up on welfare in retirement, because not everyone understands crypto, not everyone plays the stock market. Many put their faith in something they do understand—bricks and mortar.
A small unit in St Marys, an old townhouse in Emu Plains, a modest investment property in Werrington Downs is something solid, something they can touch. In Lindsay the latest available ATO data showed 5,511 people made a net rent profit, which is just 13.1 per cent of taxpayers in Lindsay, and almost 60 per cent made a net rent loss. In other words, 7.8 per cent of all taxpayers in Lindsay negatively geared a property.
They are Australians who saved, sacrificed and planned for their future, and right now they feel like the one thing they built is being taken away from them. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, one-third of family businesses will pass to the next generation in the next five years, but Labor's CGT changes threaten to turn that handover into a financial ambush.
The government insists small business is protected, but business groups warn 200,000 growing businesses could lose access to key concessions. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has urged the government to rethink its approach, arguing investment in business should never be penalised. At a recent small-business roundtable in Lindsay I heard the frustration and the anger firsthand.
There was a real sense of deflation in the room, a feeling that, no matter how hard people work, the goalposts just keep being moved. A theme emerged: what's the point? CGT was the proverbial bull in the China shop.
Australians are being punished for inflation they did not create. Every time prices rise, the government takes a little more. Every time wages merely keep pace with inflation, the taxman reaches in as if Australians are suddenly richer, and they're not.
Under Labor, bracket creep has become a stealth tax on aspiration—a quiet, relentless stealing of household budgets year after year without a single vote being cast. The coalition will end it. We will introduce a tax-back guarantee, a safeguard to ensure Australians are never taxed more simply because prices have gone up.
Under our plan, when inflation rises, tax thresholds will rise with it. Your pay packet will no longer be raided just because of the cost of living. From 2028 to 2029, we will index the bottom two income tax thresholds to inflation, protecting 85 per cent of income earners and delivering around $250 in the first year, growing to more than $1,000 by year four.
From 2031 to 2032, we will index the top two thresholds as well, delivering immediate relief of $1,250 to $1,600. This is not a temporary fix. This is structural reform—true generational reform—that restores honesty to the tax system and fairness to the Australian worker.
It is because Australians should not be punished for keeping up; they should be rewarded for getting ahead. As if taxing aspiration in life weren't enough, Labor is now taxing aspiration in death too. The Albanese government hid a 30 per cent death tax in their budget papers like an Easter egg, deliberately buried, hoping no-one would find it.
When the Prime Minister was asked in question time to rule out a death tax, he just wouldn't. We know why he couldn't rule it out—because he had already introduced one buried in the fine print he hoped Australians wouldn't read This is a government that lied more than 50 times before the election about not introducing new taxes on homes, rentals, investments and family savings, and now it's been caught trying to sneak a death tax through on top of it all.
The deception is breathtaking. The government calls this intergenerational fairness, but taxing what families pass on to the next generation is not fairness. This is a government inserting itself between grandparents and grandchildren and claiming a cut of a lifetime's worth of sacrifice and saving.
The targets are not the wealthy with complex structures and expensive accountants. The targets are the families who saved and sacrificed to have something to pass on, not as a luxury but as an expression of what it means to love your kids. The Prime Minister is fuelling fights over Sunday roasts all over Australia between generations about what will be left and what the taxman has taken.
That is not the Australia we want to build. That is the politics of resentment applied to the family dinner table. Young Australians are already being kneecapped on their rent, on their deposit and on their investment returns, and they now face the prospect of getting nothing at the end of the family line either because the government will take its cut from trusts and estates.
A government that taxes aspiration in life and taxes aspiration in death is not a government for the future. The housing crisis cannot be separated from migration, because supply and demand cannot be separated from reality. Under Labor, Australia has taken 1.4 million people, the population of Adelaide, far more than the homes we have built.
With 90,000 more people than planned arriving over the next two years, the government is stoking demand while choking supply. This is not sustainable. This is not responsible.
This is certainly not fair on young Australians already struggling to find a place to live. Labor's approach is simple: bring in more people than we can house and then tax away the investment that builds homes. The coalition will restore common sense.
A coalition government will cap net overseas migration each year based on the number of new homes completed. Never again will a government be able to bring in more people than a housing market can support. In the early years, migration will need to be significantly below the cap to allow the housing market to catch up after Labor's record migration wave.
We will also establish a $5 billion housing infrastructure fund to unlock up to 400,000 homes by funding essential last-mile infrastructure like water, sewerage, power and access roads, and we will simplify the National Construction Code to cut up to $70,000 off the cost of a new home. This is how you fix a housing crisis. You build more homes, you match migration to capacity and you stop punishing the people who invest in supply.
A country cannot thrive when its government treats aspiration like a taxable offence. A nation cannot grow when its workers are punished for keeping up and when its dreamers are punished for daring to get ahead. Australians deserve a government that backs them, not one that punishes them for just doing their best and for having a dream and aspiration.
I'm happy to promise that 50 times because, unlike the Prime Minister, I intend to keep my promise.