Choose Your Villain: Investors vs Immigrants
A guide to which Australians are politically affordable to hate.
Treasury’s own modelling says the reform will help around 75,000 first home buyers across the next decade.
That’s 7,500 a year, against a housing market that turns over around 600,000 transactions annually.
A rounding error, parading as generational justice.
There is a particular kind of cowardice that requires a great deal of energy. It looks, from the outside, like courage. It speaks at length. It announces. It points across the chamber, picks a target, and dares the other side to disagree. And it will have this week, given us two of the most performative nothingness in recent Australian political history.
On Tuesday night, the Treasurer pointed at the investor class. On Thursday night, the Opposition Leader will point at migrants. Both men will have been by their own accounts, magnificent. But instead, let’s have a look at what they were pointing away from.
Jim Chalmers handed down a budget that did the thing Labor spent the 2025 election campaign promising (fifty times according to Albo) it would not do.
Negative gearing on established dwellings, gone for new investors from 1 July 2027. The fifty per cent capital gains tax discount, gone the same day, replaced by an indexation model and a thirty per cent minimum tax on the gain. A package Treasury is calling the biggest structural tax reform since the GST.
The target is named softly, because Labor strategists are not idiots. It is the person buying their seventh, eighth, ninth home and outbidding a teacher at a Saturday auction. Treasury’s own modelling says the reform will help around 75,000 first home buyers across the next decade.
That’s 7,500 a year, against a housing market that turns over around 600,000 transactions annually. A rounding error, parading as generational justice.
Forty-eight hours later, Angus Taylor will stand up and name someone else. His culprit is mass migration. The fix is a cap on net overseas migration set at the number of new homes completed the year before. He told 2GB that the number would be “well below two hundred thousand,” and that Australians should “stop letting so many people into this bloody country.” Scrap the Housing Australia Future Fund. Scrap Help to Buy. Scrap Build to Rent. Slash the National Construction Code, including the energy efficiency standards, because seven-star homes are apparently what is keeping young Australians out of the market. Not the three decades of decisions made by men in suits exactly like his.
Two villains. Two budgets. One feckless performance.
Australian housing did not become unaffordable on Tuesday night. It did not become unaffordable when net overseas migration peaked at 550,000. It did not even become unaffordable in 1999, when Peter Costello halved the capital gains tax discount and gave the investor class its starting gun.
It became unaffordable through a thirty-year refusal, by every prime minister and every treasurer of every political stripe, to do anything about a market that quietly transformed itself from shelter into superannuation.
The capital gains tax discount in 1999 is the easy example, but it is a single tile in a much larger mosaic. First home owner grants that capitalised straight into prices. Stamp duty that punished mobility and locked older Australians into oversized homes. Self-managed super funds permitted to buy investment property and gear it. State governments releasing land at a rate that would embarrass a Soviet five-year plan. Local councils that treated every new dwelling as a personal affront. Negative gearing reviewed and then quietly buried, repeatedly, by both sides.
Every single one of these decisions was made by politicians who knew exactly what they were doing. None of them were made by the investor class, who simply played the game as it was set. None of them were made by migrants, who arrive into a market the political class has already broken. The decisions were made by a long line of elected people who looked at the rising line on the chart and thought, not on my watch, not while I still hold this seat.
Naming the actual cause implicates everyone who has ever held the despatch box, including those who held it this week. It implicates the parties that took donations from developers, and the parties that took donations from unions in the building trades. The journalists who treated property pages as the friendliest section of the newspaper for thirty years. A generation of policy economists who knew, and said so quietly in papers nobody published, that this was unsustainable.
And it implicates us… the voters. The two-thirds of Aussies who own their home, and who have spent three decades treating its capital gain as some kind of entitlement and national sport.
Try campaigning, in this country, on the proposition that house prices should fall. Tell the room, full of people whose wealth lives in their walls, that the whole bloody point of housing policy is to make housing cheaper (yes, that’s what ‘more affordable’ means if you cannot make wages go up by 200%). Watch how long you last.
This is why both Chalmers and Taylor have chosen the targets they have chosen. The investor class is acceptable because it’s small enough to vilify and grandfathered (ahem, sorry, “grand-personed”) enough to leave alone.
Migrants are acceptable because they do not vote, and the ones who do can be counted on to not vote for the people doing the vilifying. Both targets are politically affordable. Both are also wildly insufficient.
The budget reply I’d like to see is one that acknowledges that thirty years of cross-bench cowardice produced this crisis.
It would name, one-by-one, the policy decisions of every government back to Hawke and Keating that contributed.
It would propose changes that affected the political class’s own portfolios, and the portfolios of the people they have lunch with, and the portfolios of their voters.
It would accept that fixing this means people losing money, on paper, in the only asset class Australian politics has agreed never to let lose money.
Nobody in the parliament is going to give that speech. Not Chalmers, who is too proud of his own cleverness to admit it is partial. Not Taylor, who would rather lose three more elections than name his side’s role in any of it. Not the crossbench, whose entire model is built on never quite saying the thing.
So we get this instead. Two spineless performances. Two pointless villains.
Two men pretending the building is on fire because the wrong people walked in, rather than because the wrong people built it.
Damian Damjanovski writes at General Strategic. He has no investment properties, he is however an immigrant who dared to come to this country.