Budget 2026 live updates: Chalmers on media blitz to sell ‘contentious’ budget; shadow treasurer says Coalition will try to block tax reforms

You might say Bill Shorten walked so Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese could run. The pair unveiled major changes last night to negative gearing and capital gains tax, a feat that lost Shorten the 2016 and 2019 election (the latter that everyone expected him to win).

So how different is the politics of it this time?

Chalmers begins his day on the ABC’s Radio National Breakfast and says that it’s now the right thing to do. Of course the problem isn’t a new one, it’s one that younger people have been battling for years now (hence why Shorten wanted to fix it a decade ago).

Chalmers tell RN:

double quotation markThese changes are contentious. There’s no use pretending otherwise but it’s the right thing to do. The easiest thing that we could have done from a political point of view would be to see these challenges in the housing market, particularly for young people, and to see the issues in the tax system and to leave everything exactly as it was. And we didn’t think that was an acceptable outcome.

Chalmers says that the budget – which also includes a $250 tax offset for working Australians come tax time in 2028 – is moving to rely less on income tax and better deal with bracket creep.

double quotation markOne of the issues in the tax system is that it’s become out of whack. And so that new Working Australians tax offset … It’s effectively lifted the tax-free threshold for workers but not for others. And that does give us the architecture, I think, in the future, when successive governments can afford to return more bracket creep, it’s another way that we can do that.