Shadow Portfolio — 3 June 2026

Jamie Chaffey (National Party) used the second reading of the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026 to mount a targeted attack on the government's capital gains tax and negative gearing changes, while endorsing two other schedules in the same bill — a posture designed to fragment the government's package and expose its internal contradictions.

Chaffey's central charge was broken faith: the Prime Minister campaigned on a pledge of no new taxes, and the CGT and negative gearing changes contradict that promise directly. The agricultural framing was the sharpest edge of the attack. Drawing on National Farmers' Federation president Hamish McIntyre, Chaffey argued the CGT changes would increase tax liability for farmers across the succession lifecycle — reducing investment, delaying intergenerational transfer, deepening farm debt, and in the worst cases forcing sales of farmland.

This agriculture-specific framing anchors the National Party's distinctive contribution to the coalition's joint opposition effort and connects the tax debate to longstanding rural constituency concerns about land tenure and farm viability.

Chaffey also widened the critique beyond agriculture. He cited constituent feedback that the reforms entrench intergenerational inequity by withdrawing tax advantages that older Australians enjoyed — illustrating the point with an 11 percent increase in CGT liability on a $100,000 gain [TA-260603-house-804d9cb5f6e1:s072]. Financial Services Council analysis, which Chaffey cited in the debate, extended the impact argument to a broader investor cohort: from a 25-year-old with $10,000 in shares to low-income earners with modest investment portfolios [TA-260603-house-804d9cb5f6e1:s072].

The effect is to frame the CGT changes not as a measure targeting the wealthy but as a tax on aspiration across income levels.

A secondary line of attack targeted process rather than policy substance. Chaffey described the bill's provision giving the minister power to determine methods for apportioning capital gains as "legislation by stealth" — a characterisation that frames the government's drafting approach as an accountability problem, separate from the underlying policy disagreement.

The coalition's own alternative was outlined in the same speech: index the bottom two income-tax thresholds to inflation from 2028–29, delivering roughly $250 in the first year and growing to over $1,000 by year four, with the top thresholds indexed from 2031–32. This positions the coalition as offering structural tax relief through bracket-creep correction rather than the government's asset-tax approach.

Chaffey explicitly supported schedule 3 (the Working Australians tax offset) and schedule 4 (the $1,000 standard deduction for work-related expenses), drawing a clear line between the provisions the coalition will back and those it opposes. This selective endorsement is a deliberate opposition tactic: accepting the popular relief measures while concentrating fire on the CGT and negative gearing schedules makes it harder for the government to present the bill as a unified reform package.