Blow me down with a feather. Treasurer Jim ” Chicken” Chalmers has snuffed out property tax reform (on a Friday afternoon to bury it):
Jim Chalmers has finally killed off consideration of winding back tax concessions for property investors, saying the proposed changes would not do enough to boost supply in Australia’s housing market.
After weeks of controversy about modelling on changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions provided to Dr Chalmers by Treasury officials, he used interviews from Washington to finally quash speculation of a policy shift before the election.
“I think it is primarily a supply challenge, and we’ve made that clear in a lot of different ways,” Dr Chalmers told ABC TV.
Scrapping NG would indeed weigh against more supply unless it is kept on new properties, which is, arguably, the only place it makes sense anyway.
So, Chalmers is going the raw prawn again in the detail of the policy argument.
This guarantees that Labor’s mislabeled $32 housing relief program will do nothing of the sort.
- Help-to-buy will inflate prices.
- Build-to-rent will inflate rents.
- The massively undershooting HAFF will guarantee the shortage persists.
But why would we expect anything else from these greedy little men?
Albo has bought a $104.3m property on the central coast, $100n of which is yours to upgrade his driveway.
Albo’s not going to fix a housing crisis that is preventing his balance sheet from plunging into negative equity.
He has the public policy ethos of Roger Rogerson.
It’s back to the drawing board for the Greens and their Millennial fantasists who think they can reform their way to affordable housing.
They can’t. It requires hard-headed decisions that break a lot of eggs, including cutting immigration to zero.
And they want to raise it!
