Jim Chalmers

People will send an email like that effectively to us from time to time and we answer it the best we can.

But in our tax system, I think for good reason, we treat people as individuals, not necessarily as households.

There are other parts of the system, family payments and the like, which are a bit different.

But overwhelmingly, I think there are good reasons to treat people as autonomous entities when it comes to the income tax system.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a range of things that we are trying to do to recognise that vulnerable people are doing it especially tough when prices are rising for all kinds of

global and other reasons.

But if you go right up and down the income scale, what we've tried to do is provide tax relief to everyone.

One of our favorite ways to provide a bit of help is to use the tax system.

We're cutting taxes five different ways, and we've only been here for four years.

Three income tax cuts, a standard deduction,

and the new working Australians tax offset and that's a lot of that is geared towards middle Australia and people who are doing okay but not great you know people who might be trying to save a deposit that a lot of the time in the policies that we put in place and the budgets that we hand down middle Australia is really front and center next question

I've been carrying this around for some time.

I don't know.

So we did think about that other model and we thought the better way of going about it was to continue negative gearing for new properties so that we'd be, people would be making a contribution to housing supply if they access these tax breaks.

And so, you know, we had a few options that we worked through and one of them to be upfront with you and with Lychee.

Thrilling Lychee, please.

Come on, a bit of respect.

To be upfront with you and them is,

That was one of the options.

There was a little bit of worry about integrity risk, how we count and treat those first two properties, whether or not people would try and game it somehow.