Shadow Portfolio — 13 May 2026

Senator Jane Hume ran a two-front operation in the Senate on 13 May, combining a structural attack on emergency competition powers with a sustained assault on the government's capital gains and negative gearing measures — both lines of attack targeting what the opposition characterises as unchecked executive overreach and a punishing tax agenda.

In the second reading debate on the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Responding to Exceptional Circumstances) Bill 2026, Hume put the government on notice over the bill's process and design. She argued the legislation was introduced under rushed circumstances and that the new powers granted to the government and the ACCC were not sought during the pandemic, a comparison she used to question why they are needed now.

Her structural critique was pointed: the bill's provisions are retrospective, they exempt ACCC instruments from Senate disallowance, and they contain no built-in parliamentary oversight — a combination she described as dangerous. The cross-portfolio dimension of the bill was also flagged explicitly: Hume told the chamber that the Treasurer's declaration power under the bill is unlimited and not confined to the immediate fuel crisis context, making this a Treasury-portfolio concern as much as a competition-law question.

The opposition's position is conditional rather than oppositional — Hume indicated the coalition will engage constructively if the government allows proper scrutiny, and she called specifically for referral to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee.

In Question Time, Hume pivoted to tax, pressing Minister Wong directly on the distributional impact of the government's proposed increase to the capital gains tax rate to 30 percent [TA-260513-senate-d4ffca432415:s132]. Her framing was deliberately concrete: a taxpayer earning $25,000 with a $10,000 capital gain would face an additional $1,600 tax burden under the proposal, a figure designed to anchor the debate on low-income earners rather than high-wealth investors.

She then broadened the attack to negative gearing, accusing the Prime Minister of having used negative gearing himself while pursuing policies that deny younger Australians equivalent wealth-building opportunities [TA-260513-senate-d4ffca432415:s133]. Across the three QT interventions, she welded capital gains, negative gearing, and broader tax burdens into a single characterisation of the budget as a "shameless tax grab" [TA-260513-senate-d4ffca432415:s134].

The two streams connect: both attacks are built around the same organising argument — that the government is accumulating and exercising power without adequate constraint, whether through emergency competition legislation stripped of oversight mechanisms or through tax changes framed as targeting aspirational Australians. Hume's positioning on the competition bill as conditionally cooperative, combined with the sharper QT rhetoric on tax, reflects a tactical split: measured resistance on process questions, aggressive populist framing on the budget.