Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Tanya Plibersek rule out new speculation over negative gearing

Senior ministers have quickly doused fresh suggestions Labor will change negative gearing tax breaks amid the fallout from Anthony Albanese’s purchase of a $4.3 million home on the NSW Central Coast.

Housing is heating up to be one of the biggest issues in the next election and the Prime Minister’s property deal has come under intense scrutiny.

Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather jumped on the news earlier in the week to say it illustrated how broken the system was, renewing calls for the Government to curb tax breaks for property investors.

Two Labor MPs told The Australian they thought the opportunity was ripe to take a fresh look at negative gearing.

But Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and his cabinet colleague Tanya Plibersek separately ruled out any changes.

“No doors have been opened here. We’re not doing negative gearing. That’s been made manifestly clear and none of that has changed,” Mr Marles said.

“The Prime Minister has made that clear and … obviously none of this changes that. The Prime Minister is entitled to his own private life.

“But each and every day we are focused on cost of living pressures and we have a whole lot of policies in the space of housing.”

Ms Plibersek responded with a blunt “no” when asked if negative gearing changes were back on the cards.

“We’ve got $32 billion worth of housing policies… We want to be building more homes for Australians to rent, public rental, private rental to buy, to move into,” she said.

Treasury officials were looking at the effect of changes to negative gearing tax breaks last month, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers saying it would be foolish for anyone in his job not to look at all potential options.

However, he and Mr Albanese both said research showed tweaking the tax breaks would not do anything to boost housing supply, which is the biggest factor in the affordability crisis.

Mr Albanese repeatedly said negative gearing and capital gains were tax policies that didn’t have anything to do with his housing policy.

At the time, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the PM and his treasurer appeared to be at war, drawing a parallel with the move at the start of the year to change the Stage 3 tax cuts.

The debate of negative gearing dragged on for several days with Mr Albanese and ministers saying it wasn’t currently Government policy but not definitively ruling out any changes.

More than 2.2 million Australians own rental properties and almost 950,000 of them – about 40 per cent – were negatively geared in 2021-22, tax office data shows. This is about 6 per cent of all taxpayers.

Negative gearing is estimated to offer $26.8 billion in tax concessions to property owners in the current financial year, Treasury’s tax expenditures and insights statement reveals.

The top 10 per cent of income earners garner almost two-fifths of this money.