This year, the Australian Government is saying the budget will restore 'intergenerational equity'. This analysis argues that policies presented as promoting ‘intergenerational equity’ are failing to address the structural drivers of inequality. It presents recent polling indicating that young Australians are worried about burgeoning public debt. The paper proposes alternative policies to deliver intergenerational fairness.

By identifying the forces that have repeatedly undermined tax reform in Australia, this report explores whether a different approach could help Australia move beyond repeated false starts and build a more credible pathway for future change. It finds that reform failure over the last 25 years is rarely attributable to a single factor.

The role of inflation in determining the merits of different forms of capital gains taxation is widely misunderstood. This paper finds the discount is not always more generous than the previous system and can produce very high effective rates of taxation on real capital gains because taxation is levied on both real and inflationary gains.

One objective of Australia’s capital gains tax (CGT) discount is to approximate inflation and tax real gains. But because real returns vary widely across investors, a flat discount systematically misses the mark. Using data on 1.5 million property investments (2008–2025), this paper shows real returns range from losses to strong gains.

A report from the inquiry into the operation of the capital gains tax discount in Australia including its contribution to inequality, how it influences the types of assets purchased, its distributional effects and its role in suppressing productivity and whether it is fulfilling its original intended purpose. The report finds Australia’s tax system is broken.