Carrington Clarke

It depends on what conditions you put in there, your underlying assumptions.

But the argument from Treasury is that

The current settings or previous settings, I guess we're now going to be calling them, effectively subsidized investors to purchase existing homes.

And that meant that existing homes particularly, which is the thing that they're changing, the changes will mean that first home buyers aren't facing unfair competition from investors.

And that's why it's good news for first home buyers.

But all of these things can be debated.

It is in line though, isn't it, with what we'd heard from other think tanks ahead of

of this being unveiled, that these type of changes would actually help first-time buyers.

So about a hundred bucks a year.

And that number was, they think, about 75,000 properties effectively will move from being owned by investors to being owned by owner-occupiers.

Now, economic modelling is notoriously difficult.

We will see how this plays out.

We can't control for all variables, particularly at a time like now when there is so much uncertainty about the global economy.

But that is the argument the government is putting forward about why these changes are going to be positive.

And speaking of how hard it is to model economically, one of the kind of side stories I thought was interesting in this budget paper was the collapse of the tobacco excise.

So we know that they had a fuel excise cut that was on purpose because prices were going up.

But we are seeing the excise take, the tax take from tobacco, from cigarettes,

collapsing.

And that is primarily because we've seen such a huge rise in the purchasing of illegal cigarettes, black market cigarettes, which don't have the tax being added to them.

And not only has there been a massive hit to revenue in this particular financial year collapsing, but actually it is going to continue to fall in future.