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The Albanese Labor government doesn’t face voters for another 16 months, but the same palpable sense of panic is setting in, in Canberra, as in Melbourne. In Victoria, the Allen Labor government, staring down the barrel of defeat after running the state into the ground with a near-unbroken 25-year run, is trying to save itself in typical socialist fashion: with other people’s money. Federal Labor is trying on the same con – with an added soupcon of old-fashioned leftist ‘class war’. Only, this time, Treasurer Zippy and his fellow Marxists are calling it ‘intergenerational equity’.
Jim Chalmers has seized on “really serious” intergenerational pressures to defend the Albanese government moving to break an election promise and wind back property tax concessions, declaring he will build trust by convincing Australians it’s the “right decision for the right reason”.
And remember the Howard Doctrine: it’s not a broken promise if you wait till after the election to break it. Except that Zippy isn’t even waiting that long.
Anthony Albanese ruled out changes to negative gearing during the 2025 election campaign but The Australian has revealed the May 12 budget is likely to include changes, with a focus on full removal of the tax break on existing properties, inclusive of grandfathering.
The 50 per cent capital gains tax discount would also be axed in favour of inflation indexation on new investments across every asset class, but current investors would be protected by partial grandfathering.
A week out from handing down the budget, the Treasurer is under pressure to explain why voters should trust Labor over the looming broken election promise.
Chalmers has seized on “really serious” intergenerational pressures to justify winding back property tax breaks he and Albanese swore they wouldn’t touch. The projected haul? Less than a billion from negative gearing, under five billion from the CGT tweak. The NDIS alone costs nearly that much every two months.
The class-war narrative is pure deflection. Chalmers lectures older Australians about their “big contribution” while blaming the coalition for not taking housing seriously. Funny how he never mentions the real driver of house prices: Labor’s own record-high migration levels pumping demand into an already strangled market. Supply isn’t the only problem when you keep importing people faster than you can house them. But that would require admitting their open-borders fetish is making everything worse. Easier to pit boomers against millennials and pose as the champion of the young.
This is the same treasurer who, after all, studied under a literal ‘Marxian economist’, a good half-century after Marx’s economics were exposed as a colossal fraud. Undeterred, as Wayne Swan’s senior adviser, Zippy helped embed the fiscal habits that ratcheted up the size of government. Now he’s wrestling with the consequences and calling it ‘ambitious reform’. Spare us. The lavish programs his old boss sold as ‘investments’ have delivered precisely nothing except bigger recurrent spending: at least $100 billion more a year in structural commitments.
The great tragedy for Australia is that it is well-nigh impossible to identify a dividend from the programs that Chalmers’ former boss liked to describe as investments. The cost of educating a child has risen from roughly $15,500 (in 2025 dollars) in 2008 to about $25,000 today. The largest contribution to this system-wide increase in costs was the so-called Gonski reforms.
Yet OECD Program for International Student Assessment scores tracking the performance of the average 15-year-old are in steep decline. In 2008, the respective scores for reading, maths and science were 515, 512 and 510. In 2022, they were 498, 487 and 507. Once again, we had fallen into the trap of judging programs by their intentions rather than their results.
This is just what Labor want. Because even the most cursory examination of the evidence, rather than the motherhood statements, shows just how comprehensively Labor have failed us all. Education spending per child has ballooned from roughly $15,500 (in today’s dollars) in 2008 to $25,000 today. Julia Gillard’s Gonski reforms get much of the blame. Yet OECD PISA scores for 15-year-olds have fallen off a cliff: reading from 515 to 498, maths from 512 to 487. The system costs more and delivers less. Demand-driven university places since 2012 added another $2 billion a year to the tab. The National Disability Insurance Scheme, the poster child for good intentions gone feral, now costs $35 billion while breeding fraud, rent-seeking and a cultural shift that pathologises every human difficulty and dumps it on the taxpayer.
Even pensions tell the story. Rudd’s one-off hike and wage-linked indexing added billions that have compounded with demographics. Pensions are now the single biggest budget item at about eight per cent of spending. Yet Labor’s solution is never to reform the incentives or means-test properly. It’s always more transfers, more bureaucracy and more tax on the thrifty.
Contrast that with the Howard-Costello era. They encouraged super, shares and housing as nest eggs. Household wealth exploded from $1–1.5 trillion in the late ’80s to nearly $20 trillion today – 400–500 per cent real growth, twice Britain’s rate. Retirees with private health cover and super are doing the next generation a favour: fewer pensioners and fewer public hospital beds. That’s genuine intergenerational equity. Chalmers wants to punish the very thrift that made it possible.
This is Labor’s core ideological failure, on display from Melbourne to Canberra. They cannot conceive of government as anything but the solution. Every problem demands more spending, more programs, more ‘investments’ judged by intentions, never results. When the bills arrive – and they always do – the answer is never restraint. It’s class warfare dressed up as compassion: tax the landlords, tax the investors and tax the savers.
The only equity they’re delivering is equal misery for everyone who has to pay the bill.
