Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has admitted that he should have promised Australians that Labor had no plans to alter the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) exemption on the family home. This tax is paid when Australians sell investments like stocks, bonds, or real estate, but homeowners are exempted from paying CGT if they are selling their own residences.
During an interview with Sevens’s Sunrise host David Koch on Wednesday, Chalmers was asked multiple times if he could be trusted to not change the CGT exemption, yet he refused to guarantee that Labor would not touch it. This raised concerns that homeowners could be at risk of having to pay tax when selling their own place of residence in the future.
Koch then asked Chalmers to guarantee Labor would not be looking at capital gains taxes, to which Chalmers replied: “It’s not my intention, It’s not something I’ve been thinking about, working up, contemplating. We don’t know what the situation might look like in 10 or 15 years’ time.”
However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese later moved to assure Australians that Labor would not make changes to GCT on the family home. “We are not. We are not going to impact the family home, full stop, exclamation mark,” he said.
At a press conference a few hours later, Chalmers was asked whether he would follow the Prime Minister in making the commitment. He replied, “I do, do that. I should have done that this morning.” He defended his earlier response, saying that he was trying to focus on what Labor was doing, not what they were not doing.
The misstep from the treasurer comes as the centre-left Labor government is facing pressure after it decided to double the concessional tax rate on super balances that contain more than $3 million (US$2.02 million) following an election promise that Labor would not be taxing the superannuation scheme. Shadow Finance Minister Jane Hume noted that the change is “not indexed, which means that three million today is going to be very different to three million in five years times– even in two years’ time when this kicks in.” Former coalition senator, Eric Abetz, said that the government’s reasonings around the changes to the superannuation had the hallmarks of the “politics of envy.”