Ian Verrinder

But if you get an extra $50 in your pocket and you got it there for a couple of months, you don't actually remember that you had an extra $54.

Look, I think a lot of people forget what budgets are really all about.

Now, we tend to focus a lot on if it's a surplus or a deficit.

And you've had elections fought and won over whether you can deliver a surplus or a deficit and debt and deficit.

But there's another really important aspect to budgets, and that is about the redistribution of wealth or the distribution of wealth.

And the taxation system is designed specifically to do that.

And we've got a taxation system where rich people pay more tax than poorer people, or people earning more amounts of money, you know, salary, pay a higher rate of tax than people on lower salaries.

That's the way our system works.

And that distributes wealth between...

between various layers of society.

Over the past, I guess, 25 years or so, since the turn of the century, our taxation system, the pendulum has kind of swung back and it's made people who are very wealthy already

It's given them incentives to reduce their tax and to engage in investment activity that shifts the burden of the tax system from investing to workers.

So, you know, you've seen situations where, you know, fairly young workers in their 30s or so going flat out, earning an average weekly wage, you know, $80,000, whatever, $90,000 a year, paying far more tax than retirees who've got millions of dollars in superannuation and paying absolutely no tax on the earnings from that.

So that's the superannuation side.

Then you've had property tax.

incentives and property tax incentives, including negative gearing and of course, the capital gains tax discount that have been put in there specifically to encourage people to buy investment properties.

What that's done is it's increased the demand for

primarily the kind of properties that first home buyers would really be attracted to.

Investors are always looking for rental properties and, you know, at the lower end of the market and, you know, the traditional stomping ground for first home buyers.

And Labor lost two elections, 2016 and 2019, over, you know, with policies designed to try and rein these tax breaks back in.