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

Ms LE (Fowler) (21:08): I move the second reading amendment as circulated in my name: That all words after "reforms" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "outlined in this bill should be delayed until May 2028 or until after the next federal election". In bringing forward this budget, the government tells us that its change to capital gains tax is about helping more young Australians into a home of their own.

We're asked to believe it is about fairness. We are asked to believe it is about aspiration. I want to talk about the word 'aspiration'.

The government uses it often, but I'm not sure it understands what aspiration actually looks like for the people I represent. Fowler is one of the lowest income communities in this country. The median personal income in my electorate is just $521 a week.

Across Australia it is $805. The typical household in Fowler brings home around $1,403 a week, which is well below the national figure of $1,746. One in five households in my electorate lives on less than $650 a week.

These are not people chasing wealth. These are people chasing a roof over their head and people who have spent a lifetime building something honest with their own hands. In Fowler, only just over half of all homes are owned, either outright or with a mortgage.

Across the country it is closer to two in three. More than 42 per cent of households in my electorate rent, which is far above the national average of around 30 per cent. Of those families who rent, almost half hand over more than 30c in every dollar they earn just to hold onto their home.

Among those paying off a mortgage, one in four is now in mortgage stress. So when the government says this bill is for young Australians who aspire to own a home, I'm not sure who they're talking about, because I went to those young Australians and asked them, and my office has been inundated with replies. One young man, Christopher, wrote to me and told me that putting his savings into modest share investments has been one of the only realistic ways he has been able to grow a deposit in a time when the interest on a savings account does not keep pace with inflation, let alone the price of a house.

Christopher supports real action on housing, but he is concerned that the government's tax changes will deny young people who do not already own a home the same chance to build wealth that older Australians had. He asked for something simple: keep the existing capital gains discount for assets other than housing held for more than 12 months. Without that, he sees no pathway onto the ladder at all.

Another constituent, Nick, also told me that investing outside the property market has been essential to his saving for a deposit. He said that for someone on a low or middle income who finally makes a decent return it makes no sense to be taxed on the gain at a rate higher than the tax on the wages they earn. A third young man, Dylan, wrote that he, too, supports meaningful action on housing stability but that, for many young Australians, investing outside property has been one of the few realistic ways to build wealth and to one day step into the housing market.

His fear is the same: that these changes will widen the gap between generations, squashing the ability of young people to get ahead. These are the very Australians the government says it wants to help, and these young Australians are ringing the alarm bell. But this is not only a story about young people trying to build their future.

It is also a story about those who have spent a lifetime building something and who now hope to retire with dignity. A family business in my electorate wrote to me that they arrived in Australia as refugees in the early 1980s with no money to their name. They borrowed, they scraped and they sacrificed.

They survived droughts and floods, sleepless nights and real financial fear. They went without their own wages so they could pay their staff. They missed seeing their children growing up because they worked seven days a week.

In the early years they could not afford cleaners, so they scrubbed the factory toilets themselves. More than a decade on, that business is still standing. They believe it is the last processor in Sydney still handling onions grown entirely here in Australia.

It employs local people—my constituents. It supports dozens of other small businesses around it. And every single day it fights to survive against cheap imports from overseas.

For that family, the sale of their business one day is not a windfall; it is their retirement. It is the self-funded safety net they spent more than a decade building so they would never have to depend on anyone else—neither on their children nor on government handouts. They fear that this bill will wipe that safety net out.

They put it plainly: penalising small business owners and discouraging people from taking a risk does nothing at all to help one family into a home. If you strip away the final reward for that risk, the next generation of hardworking migrants and battlers will simply stop having a go. The businesses that anchor communities like mine will never be started in the first place.

Another business owner from Cabramatta, Quang, wrote to me about the same fear. His concern is that removing the longstanding capital gains discount on shares and other investments and replacing it with a much harsher regime, built around a 30 per cent tax floor, fails to recognise the real risks that are inherent in any investment decision. He said it leaves hardworking savers with a miserable choice: take a big risk for a heavily taxed reward or play it safe and let their money sit idle in the bank.

Neither, he said, helps a local family build an independent future. He's tired, he said, of being treated like a cash cow for the federal budget. Then a father wrote to me.

Mr Khanh Nguyen is a retiree and a pensioner in Cabramatta. He spent his life as a stay-at-home dad, giving his years to raising his children so they could grow up with bright, independent futures. Today, he watches those same children working themselves to the bone running their own businesses and carrying heavy overheads trying to build security for families of their own.

Everything he sacrificed for, he said, was to see them succeed. Now, he watches the goalposts move. The share market, he told me, is meant to be a place where the next generation can put their hard-earned money to work, take a careful risk and grow their savings.

But a policy that punishes success sends young people in Western Sydney a cruel message: the harder you work to get ahead, the more the Tax Office will take. As a father, he said, it troubles him deeply to watch it made harder, not easier, for his children to build a life of their own. There it is again—aspiration.

The government's favourite word, handed straight back to it by the very people it claims to be helping. I will say this because fairness demands it: if there's room in this policy to carve out relief for one favoured industry, as some in my community fear, then there must be room to protect the family enterprise that has bled for years just to stay alive. Relief cannot be for the well-connected few; it must be fair, and it must be the same for everyone.

Here is the heart of it: nothing in this bill builds a single new home. The crisis in Fowler and right across Sydney is a crisis of supply. We do not have enough homes, and the homes we do have are out of reach.

You cannot tax your way out of that. You can change the capital gains rules a dozen times over, and it will not lay one single extra brick. It will not pour one extra slab.

It will not hand over one more set of keys to more young families in Cabramatta, Canley Vale, Liverpool or Fairfield. If this government were serious about aspiration, it would be building and it would be working with communities like mine to deliver the homes our young people need. Instead, it has reached for a tax change, called it a housing policy and asked this House to wave it through.

That is not a plan for aspiration; that is a press release. It lands on a community already stretched to breaking point. People in Fowler are exhausted by the cost of living.

Rents are through the roof. Groceries and fuel keep climbing. Energy and insurance bills are becoming unmanageable.

Many are working nights and weekends juggling two or three jobs just to keep the lights on. Our unemployment rate sits at 8.6 per cent, well above the national rate of around five per cent. Good reform does not work like this.

It should be fair, it should be clear, it should give workers, families and small businesses the time they need to plan. It should be built on honest consultation, not on dismissing real concerns as a scare campaign. My amendment does not say no to change, it says, 'Not like this, and not now.' It asks the government to delay these tax changes until the later of May 2028 or the calling of the next federal election.

In that time, it asks the government to do three things: to properly model and publish the impact on young savers, on small-business owners and on modest investors; to sit down with communities like Fowler and truly hear what they're telling us, and to put these structural changes to the Australian people so they can be judged honestly in full view with a mandate.

If the government is confident that this policy is fair, it should welcome that scrutiny. It should have no fear of waiting, of consulting properly and of asking the people for their support. My community is not afraid of reform, far from it.

They have been through life-and-death experiences, just like me. What they're concerned about is becoming collateral damage in reforms designed without them in the room. They are tired of being told to tighten their belts while decisions that shape their lives are pushed through these places without their voices ever being heard.

Mr Nguyen, the father I spoke of, told me his community chose an independent voice because they're trusted to fight for the practical, long-term interests of local families ahead of party politics. That trust is the only reason I'm able to stand here and speak for them today. I do not take it lightly.

The young saver, the lifelong business owner and the father who gave everything for his children are all asking for the very same thing: a fair go and a fighting chance. They're asking us not to pull away the last few rungs of the ladder while we stand here and tell them to climb. So I say to this House: take the time, do the work, listen to Christopher, to Nick, to Dylan, to Quang and to Mr Nguyen and to the family who scrubbed their own factory floors so their children might have a better life.

We are gambling with their future, and it is only the future they have. With the mandate that the PM is supposed to have, the government must not fear to take this tax reform to the next federal election. I commend the amendment to the house.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Freelander ): Is the amendment seconded?