Jim Chalmers

It's about getting an extra 75,000 owner occupiers into the housing market over the next 10 years and it's about encouraging more innovation in our economy as well.

And so really that's a long way of saying that we don't just acknowledge that there are genuine concerns about

the generational unfairness in our budget, our tax system, our housing market, our economy more broadly, more than acknowledging that.

We're doing something about it and that invites an element of political risk.

There will be a lot of people who will go to the wall to defend the current arrangements, frankly.

A lot of defenders of the status quo.

But from our point of view, the reason we've come to this

The view that we're putting in the budget tonight and the policies that we're changing tonight in the budget is because we don't want to leave this challenge to go unattended to and to become even worse over time.

Well, a really important part of the negative gearing changes is to say if you're going to negatively gear, you've got to make a contribution to supply.

You know, we think that housing supply is still the main game when it comes to the housing problem.

But the challenge doesn't end with supply.

There's new investments in there around youth homelessness and also these big changes or two big changes we're making in the tax system.

And so the 75,000 extra owner occupiers is the net effect of both negative gearing and capital gains.

And that's because we think that the composition of the market, too many people are getting crowded out.

What happened was in 1999, a big change made to capital gains.

And what it did was it decoupled people's incomes from house prices.

And it meant that because the capital gain system was overcompensating investment in existing houses and undercompensating investment in other areas, more and more people were just ploughing into the housing market and it was crowding out more and more

more and more people, including or especially young people.

And so that's really the challenge that we're trying to address, to try and deal with that distortion which has crowded too many people out over time.

Yes, because I think something like 98% of negative gearing is property.