Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026
Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (10:38): The government wants us to believe that this is courage, that it is solving the housing crisis for generations of young people locked out by a tax system that treats housing as a commodity rather than a human right and that, after decades of cowardice, Labor has finally found a spine on negative gearing and capital gains tax, but don't believe it for a second.
These are policies that have torched housing affordability for entire generations and allowed property investors to run taxpayer subsidised rings around everyday working people for decades. But, in typical Labor fashion, we see them fluff the policy and preserve the wealth of the rich to access unfair tax breaks in perpetuity. We are backing this bill because it puts an end date on these scam tax breaks, but the grandfathering of entire property empires is shameful.
Labor have told young people that these policies are the reason you can't afford a home, and then they bake in unlimited tax breaks for the wealthy. Everyone who has already got rich off this keeps every cent. Everyone else—the young person scraping for a deposit, the renter priced out—gets nothing.
Is it any wonder young people are angry and frustrated as their struggles go on and their material conditions don't improve while every property baron who has already used these taxpayer advantages to build an empire of bricks and mortar gets to keep playing by the old rules forever? Think about who that protects. Investors in this country that own dozens of properties get these tax breaks while every nurse, every teacher and every check-out worker pays tax on every single dollar that they earn.
This was never a minor concession; it has been a wealth-hoarding machine. There are $33 billion a year in negative gearing handouts for people with two or more investment properties—this is money that could directly fund cost-of-living relief for renters and mortgage holders—and that includes 11,000 landlords with seven-plus houses who claimed $1.9 billion from 98,000 investment properties.
The system is built for the wealthy and delivers for the wealthy. This is not real reform; it is the same old, same old dressed up as something more generous. I can picture the property barons right now—portfolios stacked, decades of hoarding locked in a safe, grinning like the cat that got the cream.
They know exactly what unlimited grandfathering means. Their wealth is untouchable. Labor had a once-in-a-generation chance to claw back hoarded wealth and hand power back to ordinary people, but they looked away and missed the opportunity.
This is a government that will never touch its rich mates' wealth, even while admitting that wealth was built on a rigged system. For decades, the Greens have argued that unfair tax concessions are pushing homeownership further out of reach and driving inequality. While Labor and the coalition spent 25 years protecting this rort, we were the only ones fighting for a tax system built for people, not portfolios.
The Greens have secured an amendment that will prevent wealthy property investors from exploiting a loophole to use self-managed super funds to buy up tax advantaged investment properties and will remove ministerial discretion that would have allowed the minister to wind back these reforms. It is a small step in the right direction, but what really needs to happen is this.
Scrap the capital gains tax discount, end negative gearing, tax billionaires and big corporations properly, tax the one per cent, and build public homes at the scale that is needed so everyone can have a roof over their head. That is real reform: wealth, power and ownership wrenched back from the ultrarich and billionaires and returned to the people. But Labor's state governments are wrenching public homes from communities and the people who live there, demolishing them and handing them over to private developers.
It is happening in my neighbourhood in Sydney. It is happening in Melbourne. It is happening across the country.
Labor governments are demolishing public housing for the interests of private investors and private developers, and good on the communities who are resisting this and who want to protect public homes in their communities—some have lived there for generations in some cases. Good on them. They will keep fighting, and we will keep fighting with them.
Labor's lack of ambition to solve the housing crisis is staggering, but the same is true for climate, for higher and higher uni fees and for everything else. They are completely wasting their majority government by refusing to make big, bold changes. Instead they are tinkering around the edges.
Well, enough of that. Labor is not going to fix any crisis. Let's not be fooled by their words, which are not followed up by the action that is actually needed.
The Greens are not here to facilitate their failings; we are here to take them on and to win.