Cis Podcast

Read the paper at www.cis.org.au  Executive Summary. This paper is an expanded version of a submission to the Senate Select Committee on the Operation of the Capital Gains Tax Discount. The author gave evidence to the Committee at a hearing on 25 February, 2026. Although there is much public discussion of the capital gains tax discount, there is no proposal from government on the table for us to respond to — only rumours and speculation — so our comments are broad-ranging and not confined to housing. As well as the submission, there have been three relevant research publications on CGT issued by the CIS in 2009, 2015 and 2019. Perusal of those publications will show that we do not think much of proposals to reduce the CGT discount. If three publications looks like an obsession, we have had a lot to say on the issue because calls for the discount to be cut or eliminated have been a persistent theme of tax policy debate ever since the defeat of the Howard government, which put the 50% discount in place in 1999.