cadet wrote:That Australians have for years been tipping their money into residential property as a way to get ahead and build wealth, rather than into business, manufacturing, and innovation, and that there have been incredibly generous tax incentives and concessions to do it, has had the perverse outcome of smashing productive economic growth. It's well past time that was addressed. Reform was beyond necessary. Policy settings as they've been for a couple of decades under all governments now have been hollowing out the middle class that drives national prosperity. Something had to change. Is this the right set of changes? Hard to say until I've read and parsed what the actual changes are and how they affect me, and other middle Australians long term; consulted my accountant and advisor after they've had a chance to digest things; and read the musings of intelligent economists like Kohler, Richardson et al; but leaving things as they were was not going to drive improvement for an aspirational middle class. Too much GDP and national wealth is tied up in and driven by residential property, which is essentially economically unproductive; and GDP growth has been propped up by immigration, rather than actual productivity. I'm inclined to think that the mainstream legacy media - essentially mouthpieces for the rent-seeking and billionaire class - and who have a direct financial (conflict of) interest through real estate sales platforms in a roaring, over-priced property market - screaming blue murder is probably an indication that this is a positive start. The budget appears not to have touched resource taxes though, so our gas especially essentially continues to be given away for free.
Agree with most of what you've said Cadet, but don't agree that the average middle class punter family having a few houses and suffering the headaches of that has anything whatsoever for this country losing focus on innovation and startups.
For too long, governments on all levels strangled now innovation and business, sure there's small tax benefits when things go well but until then, nothing but red, green and sh*t smalling tape.
Everything is thrown at personal ambition that's possible, there's nothing but governments talking lies and no help to train apprentices, fund them, encourage us to be raw materials self sufficient blah blah.so what to do? Buy property? Well, how dare the little person profit like the politicians do eh?
F**k them.