Budget 2026 live updates: Coalition pledges to repeal Chalmers’ tax reforms amid mixed reception for ‘difficult’ budget

Shadow treasurer Tim Wilson says his objective is to ‘defeat’ changes to capital gains and negative gearing. Follow today’s news live

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‘These changes are contentious’ Chalmers admits

You might say Bill Shorten walked so Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese could run. The pair unveiled major changes last night to negative gearing and capital gains tax, a feat that lost Shorten the 2016 and 2019 budget (the latter that everyone expected him to win).

These changes are contentious. There’s no use pretending otherwise, but it’s the right thing to do. The easiest thing that we could have done from a political point of view would be to see these challenges in the housing market, particularly for young people, and to see the issues in the tax system and to leave everything exactly as it was. And we didn’t think that was an acceptable outcome.

One of the issues in the tax system is that it’s become out of whack. And so that new Working Australians tax offset … It’s effectively lifted the tax-free threshold for workers, but not for others. And that does give us the architecture, I think. In the future, when successive governments can afford to return more bracket creep, it’s another way that we can do that. Continue reading...