Stephen Koukoulas

It's not going to happen this year.

We're still going to have three point something on the trimmed mean inflation rate for the rest of this year.

And with a little bit of good luck, and perhaps if the economy weakens from these rate hikes permeating through the economy, we'll get the two point something inflation rate in the early part of 2027.

But that's now becoming the main game with an eagle eye on what's happening internationally.

Thank you, Ruby.

My first thought is at long last.

We've been talking about the unfairness of the tax system as it applies to housing for many, many years and the distortion it creates in the housing market giving that unfair financial advantage to investors.

And as a result of that, the unfair disadvantage to first home buyers or even early stage upgraders in the house.

So you go from your two bedroom flat to a little cottage somewhere.

So you're actually seeing some tax reform that takes away some of this financial incentive.

to negative gear established dwellings and to have a more realistic taxing arrangement to the capital gains through the change to the capital gains tax discount and indexing it back to inflation, which seems to be a lot fairer, but a lot more constructive in terms of improving the interplay of first homebuyers versus investors.

Well, the politics got in the way of making them retrospective or to encompass existing holders.

So I'm reminded a little bit of the introduction of compulsory superannuation from Paul Keating in the early 90s.

That might sound like a strange thing to say, but we can see now how that evolved into something that's really quite powerful.

And

If we think back to then, Keating sort of announced a 3% contribution to superannuation.

And after a year, there was chicken feed in your superannuation account.

It wasn't much.

Then, of course, the 3% got revised higher and higher and higher.

So we have this situation now where people, if you've been in the paid workforce for two or three decades, have actually accumulated a tidy sum.