Labor’s policies on negative gearing and capital gains give Turnbull the basis for a scare campaign. Not only are these bad policies, but all of us have a stake in the housing market as owners or occupiers.
Labor’s stated aim is to drive house prices lower, which won’t please home owners, while the evidence is that abolishing negative gearing for all but new housing, and giving Australia the second highest capital gains tax regime in the world, will drive rents up as well.
There isn’t a winner in sight, which means that, using Labor’s criteria of “fairness” being no one is worse off, this is an unfair policy.
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When it suited Menzies he would also steal policies from his opponents, who were very good at putting them out on the table for him.
It could be the case that Turnbull has taken us back to an earlier paradigm of politics where government is actually won in the centre, rather than being a tussle for the working class conservative vote out on the edges.
A paradigm where the Liberal Party is actually the party of pragmatism, rather than of ideology, and where an opposition anxious to prove it has policies leaves itself open to fierce attack on what it would do in office, taking the focus off what the government has done in office.
This article is based on a qualitative poll of 1568 Australians carried out in December, 2015. You can download the report by clicking here.
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