CAMERON MILNER: Labor could make life fairer for young Aussies, but Albanese might not have the guts

It’s time for Labor to finally tackle capital gains concessions and the largesse of negative gearing.

Anthony Albanese needs to look no further than Bill Shorten’s plan to guide these changes.

A reform-starved Labor Party membership is rightfully asking: “If not now, when?”

The Liberals — even under Angus Taylor — are no threat to Labor’s hegemony. One Nation’s rise as the voice of the pissed off protest voter for now is not a threat to a re-elected Albanese.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has rightly framed these necessary tax reforms as restoring the unwritten intergenerational compact to ensure equity of access and budget burden evenly spread across age groups.

Two of the most obviously inequitable tax arrangements are capital gains concessions and access to negative gearing.

Why? Because they are so clearly skewed to now the minority of the electorate, those now aged over 40.

The younger majority of voters are only just above a quarter of those who access negative gearing.

On capital gains it’s even more biased to the benefit of the ageing minority, especially wealthy boomers.

These two tax concessions are also overwhelmingly used in relation to residential investments. This in turn is impacting the supply of residential property for purchase and the prices being asked.

While the overall level of home ownership sits at about 65 per cent, younger voting cohorts have much lower levels and they are declining fast.

Amongst voters aged 25-34 home ownership has dropped from 61 per cent in 1971 to only 43 per cent last year, according to the Productivity Commission.

The largest voting cohort in Australian politics are the least likely to own a home, use negative gearing or access the capital gains tax concessions.

Little wonder 10 years after Shorten and then-shadow treasurer Chris Bowen first championed these changes, Chalmers knows these policies have finally come of age.

And the Liberals are doing just what their boomer mates want — total opposition while being able to little more than heckle from the cheap seats.

This Parliament has the numbers to pass these reforms this year. Labor can announce with confidence in the May Budget and have them implemented by year’s end.

The only remaining question is if Albanese and his Cabinet have the courage to embrace the Shorten agenda. This will sit at odds with the Albanese’s 2019 post-election analysis that spawned the “small target” election. We’ll know soon enough in the May Budget.

The Liberals already look badly out of touch, but a boomers first policy lens will condemn them to electoral irrelevance.

Tellingly, Liberal talent like Keith Wolahan are challenging the party’s boomer orthodoxy and speaking of the need to connect with a younger generation, especially on tax fairness and housing access as well as climate.

Analysis of last year’s Federal election shows Labor received 64 per cent of the vote among younger millennials on a two-party preferred basis, and 67 per cent among gen Zs.

Sure, the Liberals won amongst Boomers, but that gets you just 43 seats in the House to Representatives.

The Liberals can’t hope to gain a majority again without winning more from the younger majority of voters.

The party is already up against it with its climate denialism and lack of a climate target.

And on immigration they’ll never out-right One Nation, so younger voters concerned about migration will likely vote for Pauline anyway.

This is why refusing to engage on tax reforms like capital gains and negative gearing makes no sense.

Labor can pass this already, so the Liberals would do better by getting a seat at the table and arguing for lower income taxes and not allowing Labor to bank the tax windfalls against endless, reckless spending.

Taylor must learn from the tax cut he opposed in Labor’s last Budget and going to the last election promising higher taxes and higher government debt.

Just like Packer only had one Alan Bond, Taylor for Chalmers was the gift that just kept giving.

Labor, with uncharacteristic courage, can make these changes now. Revenue will flow and policies appealing to under 40s like HECS debt abolition can be afforded.

All while the Liberals look like the party of the last century, 26 years after this one has already started.

The Liberals need to weigh promising at the next election to restore these plainly unfair tax benefits for the older few or instead be the party of lower taxes for all, embrace ambition and deliver personal freedoms with less government in people’s lives.

Instead of looking like laggards on tax reform the Liberals can get back to core business like attacking Labor on cost of living, runaway inflation and interest rate rises.

They can return to their natural strengths of being seen to be better economic managers.

The Liberals can’t stop these tax reforms and it’s ironic that the only thing protecting wealthy boomers from tax reform is Albanese himself.

Albanese looks for all world a great procrastinator, a tinkerer leading a dithering majority. Policy timidity is the hallmark of his Government.

Labor though must finally implement the Shorten reform agenda, just as the Liberals have to shed the policy shibboleths of a time long past.

A failure by either will condemn the voting majority to houses that are harder to buy and a tax system that skews to boomer wealth at expense of all other generations in Australia.

This is the inter generational inequity that Chalmers so rightly calls out.

We need to return to truly being a nation of a fair go for all and that starts with fairly reforming both negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions.

Cameron Milner is a former Queensland Labor State secretary