Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said he believes the government is selling their budget well as countless business owners take to social media sharing AI images of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese showing him as a new “business partner” after changes to the capital gains tax discount.
“Obviously when you’re making difficult economic reforms, that can be politically contentious,” Chalmers told a Sydney press conference.
“It’s not surprising to us that some people would prefer that the existing arrangements stay exactly as they are, but those existing arrangements are locking too many Australians, particularly young Australians, out of housing, and so we’ve taken some difficult decisions, some politically contentious decisions to fix the challenge that we’ve got at the intersection of our housing market and the tax system.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers.Alex Ellinghausen
Chalmers said the government’s budget had made the tax system fairer, and that the idea circulated in the memes that the government was taking 47 per cent of profits once businesses were sold was not an accurate representation of the tax changes.
“We’re not changing the 47 per cent marginal rate that’s being referred to in those memes. What we are changing is the way that the capital gains tax discount is calculated. There’ll still be a discount, but it will be calculated according to inflation rather than the nominal discount that has applied between 1999, and now we’re going back to the system that existed before this distortion was introduced into the market at the end of the last century,” he said.
Earlier, Albanese said of the memes: “I think some of them are very flattering, and I thank them for picking the very nice photos of me.”