Carrington Clarke

And I'm Gareth Hutchins, ABC's business and economics reporter.

Gareth, it's so nice to be down here with you in Canberra Parliament House.

I've made the trip down for what is effectively Christmas in Canberra.

There has been fevered speculation about what is going to be in this budget.

There is a kind of buzz already here the day before it's announced.

A lot of stakeholders are making the trip to Canberra so they can get their hands on the budget during the lock-up.

so that they can analyze and see whether or not they are winning or losing out of this particular budget.

Going into this period, I think there had been a lot of speculation that Jim Chalmers wanted this to be a major reforming budget.

But then we had this war in the Middle East, this major oil supply shock wreaking havoc on the global economy, but also the forecast.

But it does appear, doesn't it, that the government is deciding to go down the path of some pretty significant taxation changes, even though they face some pretty high political risk, particularly when it comes to seemingly breaking election promises.

What do you make of the current situation we're in and what the government might be unveiling tomorrow?

The government talks about intergenerational fairness, intergenerational equity, this idea that older generations have...

have benefited from the taxation arrangements that are currently in place, particularly when it comes to housing, negative gearing, capital gains tax discount, but that has made housing unaffordable for younger generations.

And although when they went to the last election, the big focus was on supply,

It appears, and the government is no longer ruling out that there won't be changes, obviously, to those two taxation settings, that the government wants to do kind of everything all at once when it comes to housing.

That, yes, there's going to be a big focus on building more houses and doing what they can at the federal level to help facilitate that.

But they also think that there needs to be change to taxation to make it easier for younger people

to compete to buy a house, i.e.

to take away some of the competitive advantage that investors might have when it comes to taxation.

Do you think that is the right economic move?