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Zippy is off the leash. The Albanese government is now the highest-taxing and highest-spending government in Australian history. Can Australians really say they’re getting value for their ever-increasing gouge of tax money?
Jim Chalmers will become Australia’s highest income-taxing treasurer since records were kept, driven by personal collections.
Budget paper figures show that total income tax as a share of GDP will hit 18.6 per cent in 2025-26 and 2026-27, staying at similarly high levels for the next three years.
As the following graph shows, Australia’s debt plummeted under the Howard-Costello government, with the nation becoming a creditor in the mid-2000s. Then you can literally pinpoint the moment Labor was re-elected – and debt soared. And soared. The uniparty being what it is, subsequent coalition governments were little better.
But Chalmers is another beast entirely.
Personal income tax is forecast to climb as high as 12.8 per cent by 2029-30 – the highest since 1989. Bracket creep is doing the heavy lifting, naturally. The young wage slaves get hammered hardest because they earn wages, not assets. Classic Labor: soak the productive to fund the bureaucracy.
Chalmers’ big reveal? $77bn in new taxes targeting aspirational Australians and retirees who dare use negative gearing, capital gains concessions or family trusts. Sound familiar? It’s the Bill Shorten 2019 playbook, dusted off and rebranded. The same class-war drivel that lost Labor the election then is now gospel under Albanese’s wandering eye.
Negative gearing and capital gains tax will start collecting in 2028–29 at $1.3bn, rising to $2.3bn in 2029-30. The new minimum 30 per cent tax on trust distributions kicks in later, sucking another $4.5bn. All the pain delayed just long enough to get past the next poll. Classic.
As for Chalmers’ blatherskite about ‘intergenerational equity’:
The independent Parliamentary Budget Office has previously noted that younger people who derive a higher proportion of their income from wages and salaries compared with assets would bear the burden of higher taxes through bracket creep.
Meanwhile, the Working Australian Tax Offset, Labor’s pathetic attempt to give back some of the bracket-creep loot, will cost $3.3 billion by 2029–30, which barely touches the sides of the $77 billion tax grab. Not means-tested, of course. Everyone gets a crumb, while the government keeps the loaf.
This is not wealth creation: it is wealth churn. Tax-and-spend socialism doesn’t grow the pie – it merely slices it thinner and hands the biggest pieces to the bureaucracy (who just coincidentally vote solidly left), while the government lectures the rest of us about ‘equity’. Meanwhile, productivity in the public sector has been declining for years while the tax take soars. Same story in Britain under Rachel Reeves: punishing work, investment and saving while the state bloats. Reeves’ “black hole” budget was supposed to fix everything. Instead, growth stalled, investment fled and taxpayers copped it. Chalmers is sprinting down the same path.
Tax-and-spend doesn’t build anything lasting. It funds NDIS rorts, renewable fantasies that deliver blackouts, and a public service whose output per dollar keeps falling. Every extra billion extracted is a billion less in private hands for genuine investment, innovation, and jobs. The bureaucracy grows fat; productivity stagnates; the punters pay twice – once in tax, again in higher prices and slower growth.
Compare the Howard era, when the tax-to-GDP ratio peaked at 24.6 per cent but was paired with real economic reform, not class warfare. Labor’s version is pure extraction dressed as compassion.
Chalmers can spin all the intergenerational equity guff he likes. The reality is simpler: Labor governs for its clients – the public sector unions, the welfare lobby, the inner-city elites – not the suburban battlers and regional workers who actually generate the wealth. When the mining boom inevitably cools or global headwinds hit, the shiny new taxes won’t magically conjure productivity. They’ll just accelerate the decline.
The great Australian dream of getting ahead through hard work and smart choices is being taxed into oblivion. And the worst part is that they have the cheek to call it ‘progress’.
