Chris Richardson

As I like to say, the clue is in the name, right?

Non-compete clauses.

We are stopping competition and competition is a grand thing.

If we do really wind back the scope of those clauses or even get rid of them and protect intellectual property directly, you can have as big an impact on prosperity as some of the huge tax fights, the changes out of tax that we can get.

So I do worry that sometimes we roar down rabbit holes rather than chasing some of the easier wins that we could achieve.

Yeah, and they're not going to have that much of an impact.

And let me add, because I do worry about – so I'm broadly happy in particular with the capital gains tax change, but I do worry that it's being marketed, it's being spun as, you know, this solves housing affordability in Australia and the good –

academic work in this area has never claimed that.

And the simple illustration, over the next five years, the changes to cattle gains tax and a negative gearing will raise an extra $3.6 billion in tax.

Now, that's a lot of money I would bend down and pick it up.

But across the same five years, we will, as a nation, pay about $600 billion in terms of mortgage interest payments, not principal, just mortgage interest payments.

So 3.6 versus 600.

Or look at the total size of Australian housing, currently valued at $12.3 trillion.

These sort of changes will have an overall impact on housing.

But if you think of housing as a big rock and we are moving the lever there, we've got a tiny lever and this is Australia's largest rock, I would take you back to 2021, around 2022 even.

At that stage, before interest rates started rising in Australia, you could have made two relatively reasonable arguments about

about why Australian housing was so unaffordable.

One was, well, interest rates had been falling for a long time during the pandemic.

They fell to essentially nothing.

And when money is cheap as chips, no wonder housing prices had gone up.