Q: Can you categorically rule out any changes to capital gains tax or negative gearing, including capital gains tax if you form government?

This question is just a waste of time because no major party is suggesting tax reform in these areas, no matter how desperately needed it is.

Dutton:

You should be assured the coalition government will not tax the family home, you can be assured we’re not going to change the arrangements into the capital gains discount arrangements, and similarly in relation to negative gearing. I want young Australians to get into housing. And I don’t want rents to be driven up, which is exactly the model that Adam Bandt is promising. And in a Labor Greens government, which is the only option if the Labor Party is to form government after the election, it’s a disaster for WA. It will stop mining projects from going ahead. It will stop investment into different asset classes, including housing.

If you abolish negative gearing, people will just move their money into equities or somewhere else. And that’s going to make the cost of housing more expensive and it will create a less certain environment for people as they approach their retirement, when they have worked hard all their lives to pay off a rental property and they’re relying on the rent to help them support their own kids and grandkids, why Labor would want to affect it is beyond me.

OK, well this isn’t the winning answer he thinks it is. It might be a winner if this was still John Howard’s Australia, when Howard could literally say to an ABC radio host that ‘no one is coming up to me in the street complaining about their house prices’. The Greens have created that policy in RESPONSE to what voters are telling them. It’s a grandfathered negative gearing policy and then beyond that, if you want an investment property you can have one, but not get a tax break from the government for it. That’s it.

And the idea that this will make housing more expensive became people will move their equity into something else? Well won’t that just put more houses onto the market, therefore increasingly supply, which Dutton says is the reason that he is cutting migration – to increase supply (even if his numbers are dodgy) and that will make houses and rentals cheaper.

So apparently cutting migration will make housing cheaper because it will increase supply, but people selling investment properties to put their equity elsewhere, increasing supply, will make housing more expensive. Make. It. Make. Sense.