Negative gearing reform is complex and fraught, with a chequered recent history. The key to any future reform will be finding a way to equitably change it without losing its benefit.
What might be Malcolm Turnbull’s worst nightmare, apart from losing the election? Scraping back as a minority government, with Tony Windsor in balance of power.
Already on the hustings: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull takes a selfie with locals at Torrensville, South Australia.
AAP/Ben Macmahon
The Coalition has a solid 53-47% two-party lead in the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll but Malcolm Turnbull’s ratings have taken a hit in the last month.
Before entering politics, Scott Morrison was employed to develop policy for the Property Council of Australia, which is now leading the charge against negative-gearing reform.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The default position for politicians is to sound concerned about housing affordability, but do nothing. This can be explained by the idea of ‘policy capture’, in this case by industry interests.
About a third of property investors are positively geared.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has warned that Labor’s negative gearing policy would deliver “massive shocks” to the residential housing market and drive all investors away. Does that claim stack up?
Mandurah is an example of built density without intensity: five-to-ten-storey buildings with generous public space but a population density less than your average suburb.
Kim Dovey
Curbing negative gearing will help get empty housing onto the market. This could go some way to bringing life back to relatively dense urban centres that are oddly lacking intensity of public life.
Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison often seem in different places, and not just on tax options.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Politics has its own purgatory, as Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott might have reflected when they sat on the same table at the Howard government’s 20th anniversary dinner on Wednesday.
In comments to the Coalition joint partyroom, Tony Abbott urged the government to go down the savings path.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
On Monday, a scarifying account of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership appears in the bookshops. By journalist Niki Savva, The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government…
The release of the defence white paper this week revealed plans to substantially increase Australia’s military spending over the next two decades.
Malcolm Turnbull and Kelly O'Dwyer this week made contradictory comments about the effects of implementing Labor’s capital gains tax reforms.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The Turnbull government desperately needs a circuit breaker. It is in an appalling mess over tax policy and it can’t afford to wait until the budget to have it sorted out.
A key problem with working out the impacts of negative gearing is that we don’t know exactly which properties it affects or the status of their tenants.
AAP/Dan Peled
What if there was a middle option between retention and abolition that made negative gearing work better? There are multiple ways to improve accountability for this $8 billion-a-year tax concession.
Labor’s proposals could address housing affordability.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Negative gearing is not the housing saviour those in the industry claim it to be.
Labor’s Chris Bowen and Bill Shorten announced plans for new tax rules, and the government, even as it attacked their plan, has also opened the door to changes to negative gearing.
AAP/Gemma Najen
The problem is there are already too many buyers willing to pay high prices, and negative gearing is designed to create more buyers willing to pay more.