Danny

I am a lawyer in Brisbane. I have my ear to the ground when it comes to QLD politics & news.

[Geoff Wilson @GeoffWilsonWAM]

“Scare campaign full of lies” says the guy (@JEChalmers) getting absolutely grilled for lying about inheritance taxes, small business treatment, and now backpedaling on house prices like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
@JEChalmers owning nothing and coping hard. The public isn’t buying your spin and gaslighting anymore. The bad CGT must be stopped

[christopher joye @cjoye]

No surprise, but it begs the question: if you lied relentlessly before the election about these taxes, and you now have voters clearly rejecting them en masse, how can you possibly try to legislate these policies now given the election was won on the basis of grossly misleading and deceptive representations? One Nation surges ahead of Labor as budget flops: Poll https://t.co/ZQs5yR7kZD

[Robin Dods @toy59496]

The End of DIY Tax Returns.

https://t.co/byxDoStUTY

Currently 43% of Australians do their own tax without an accountant - well, not anymore.

Every single Australian will need an accountant after the new Labour CGT policy.

Under the old system it was easy, you took away your purchase price from your sale price, if you'd held it for more than 12 months you divided by 2. No problem for almost anybody to execute that arithmetic that got past Grade 4.

Not anymore.

Look at this table which I've created for quarterly inflation figures over 30 years.

Imagine Bob the pensioner has a portfolio of 20 stocks over 15 years each with a dividend reinvestment program.

He will have to figure out which quarter he bought the shares, which quarter he sold the shares, and divide the two numbers to get his inflation correction. For each dividend he will need to do the same thing. Overall he will have to consult the table 1,280 times.

That is total nuts.

Of course he is not going to do that...he's going to be forced to get an accountant with fees that may be more than he actually earnt from his shares. He won't have access to the fancy software that does these calculations or even understand how it works if he did purchase the fancy software. It's no longer simple arithmetic.

A fair and equitable tax system must be easily understood and as simple as possible to implement. This is neither easily understood and far from simple to implement. It's also impossible for Bob to make a good guess as to how things are going to go on the future. Too many numbers. Too hard.

It is an administrative nightmare.

[TaxPawspective @TaxPawspective]

Taxing a capital gain that has grown for years (eg 10+) based on a single year’s tax brackets with no averaging is self-evidently antithetical to aligned treatment.

More so the minimum 30% CGT rate and asymmetric limit of indexing to gains only.

The only principle is tax ⬆️.

[AT @ryu_tay]

The more I think about CGT indexation for shares, the more detached from reality it seems.

Treasury appears to treat the stock market as if it’s one giant index fund that steadily rises with inflation. That’s not how actual investing works.

Individual stocks are volatile. Explorers can move 50% on a drilling result. Biotechs can halve overnight. Tech stocks can swing 30% in a week!

So if gains before and after a rule change are separated using some valuation date, what happens when a stock is temporarily down 60% on that day and recovers later? Suddenly most of the gain gets pushed into the new tax regime purely because of market noise.

That’s not tax reform. That’s tax roulette.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇮🇹 Every year in Rome, thousands of rose petals fall through the Pantheon’s giant 9-meter dome during Pentecost.

One of the most beautiful things you’ll ever see.

[Dave Sharma @DaveSharma]

Under Labor’s new tax:

— You can walk into a casino, come out $1000 ahead, and pay $0 tax

— but if you make $1000 on shares/ETFs, you will pay $300-470 in tax

— if you build & sell a business, the ATO now takes 30-47% of your gain

Gambling is tax-free. Investing is punished.

[James Morrow @pwafork]

Let’s see how this goes here …

[Dave Sharma @DaveSharma]

Tax on investment gains

🇳🇿 NZ: 0%
🇸🇬 Singapore: 0% 
🇨🇦 Canada: 27% max
🇬🇧 UK: 20% – 24% max
🇺🇸 US: 20% max
🇮🇱 Israel: 25% (Standard)

❌❌ 🇦🇺 Australia: 30% - 47%

Labor’s new minimum capital gains tax is HIGHER than the max in most nations.

Higher taxes = less investment.

[Osher Feldman @OsherFeldman]

Your mate promises “I’ll repay the $5000” to get the cash, then says: “It was just a statement… I’ve changed my position.” You’d try chase it, and never trust him again.

But when Albo does this on taxes to all? We’re expected to accept it. Pure contempt!

[Anthony Khallouf @ausvstheagenda]

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners to stop making Ai memes of him taking 47% of their capital gains.

[Noel Whittaker @NoelWhittaker]

The government just cut private health insurance rebates for 2.6 million seniors to save $482M — but actuaries say it'll cost public hospitals $547M extra.

So they slugged the elderly, gutted private health, and lost money doing it.

Intergenerational equity? More like an intergenerational own goal. 🤦

[christopher joye @cjoye]

There are two other dire consequences of this budget that nobody is talking about. The first is that the budget’s introduction of an effective capital gains tax of up to 45 per cent - 47 per cent – previously capped at 23.5 per cent for assets held more than 12 months – hits younger savers hardest, precisely because they have the highest portfolio exposures to high-growth assets such as listed global equities, Australian shares, crypto, venture capital and private equity.
When anyone builds a portfolio for younger investors, they rationally load them up with the highest-growth and most volatile assets on the basis that a long investment horizon allows them to weather the inevitable volatility storms.
As investors age, these portfolios shift into more stable and income-rich asset classes such as cash and bonds, which are net beneficiaries of the CGT increase, because their post-tax returns now look more attractive relative to growth assets.
As many investors have noted online, why would you allocate to a bunch of high-risk growth companies when Albanese and Chalmers are going to take almost half the upside while wearing none of the downside? Rather than helping younger generations, the highest CGT rate in the developed world will hammer them.
And it is a double whammy because the many early-stage companies that have historically employed 20- and 30-somethings will now consider moving overseas. Their investors will simply not want to trade away half of their upside to the public oligarchs.
If you allocated $10,000 to bitcoin after the March 2020 pandemic shock – which many young punters did, and which would now be worth approximately $92,000 – the new CGT regime imposes vastly higher amounts of tax.
A self-funded retiree on the tax-free threshold would go from paying nothing to almost $24,000. Somebody earning between $18,000 and $45,000 a year would see their tax bill jump from $7400 to $23,900 – a 222 per cent increase. Those in the $45,000 to $190,000-plus tax brackets would have their bill rise by 93 per cent.
Since the new CGT regime is, by definition, much more costly on higher-growth investments, it will punish younger investors who have much greater risk appetites and lower average incomes.

https://t.co/MJKvQZXvKw

[Crispin Rovere @crispinrovere]

WATCH: @Channel7's Mark Riley *obliterates* Treasurer Jim Chalmers with the best question I've ever seen. 👇

[James Morrow @pwafork]

If Labor wants to use inflation to calculate your capital gains tax then inflation should also be taken into account calculating income tax brackets. Two way street and all that.

[Noel Whittaker @NoelWhittaker]

The Senate should ask a very simple question: how does reducing housing stock by 35,000 homes and pushing rents even higher help a housing crisis already locking young Australians out of home ownership? According to the Budget papers, that’s exactly what these policies will do.

[christopher joye @cjoye]

https://t.co/wWTHhVRFMW

[Jeff Kennett @jeff_kennett]

The removal of the rebate for private health insurance for people over 65, is grossly unfair.
The rebate should have been means tested.
Many seniors are low income or on pensions.
Their health insurance is often their biggest expense which they struggle to keep.
Unfair.

[Timjbo 🇦🇺 @TimjboAU]

Watch Channel 7's Mark Riley destroy Jim Chalmers with a direct question.

Grim Jim's answer was spectacular waffle, similar to what his trainer, Drain, oops, I mean Wayne Swan, would say.

#Budget2026 #auspol

[christopher joye @cjoye]

While doubling capital gains tax to levels that are multiples the CGT paid in other countries to make Australia the worst place in the world to set up a business that employs loads of people who also participate in the profits of that business - the single most productivity destroying policy you could imagine. And we are raising all these taxes that you promised not to touch 12mths ago because government has a horrific addiction to spending and wasting taxpayers’ hard-earned cash - if we cut your spending back to 2007 levels, slashed the NDIS, and sold the NBN, we could radically reduce taxes…