Housing has reached endgame Monopoly, and the 2026 budget fails to flip the board
By Chels Hood Withey
For 25 years, the combination of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount have entrenched a system that rewards house-hoarding over housing people. This week’s federal budget takes a swing at levelling the playing field for all Australians, but the rigged game is still far from over, writes House You founder Chels Hood Withey.
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I was just three years old when the Howard Government introduced the Capital Gains Tax discount in 1999, dealing me into a game I never wanted to play. By the time I was old enough to need a home I was locked out of a board by players who hoarded more than they needed - leaving the rest of us paying rent forever. It is a game subsidised by our own tax dollars, a game we never should have played.
For 25 years, the combination of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount funnelled our money into a system that rewarded house hoarding over housing people. We’ve reached the painful end of a game of Monopoly where a small few squeeze everybody else tighter and tighter for access to a basic human right. Once someone’s got hotels on Mayfair - or Airbnbs on the regional coast, or luxury apartments that were once public housing - the rest of us are stuck, with no way to get home.
This week’s federal budget takes the first swing in a quarter of a century at resetting the game. Winding back the Howard era 50% CGT discount is a win, and it wasn’t delivered by politicians having a sudden change of heart. It was won by years of community organising, people power, and the 70% of renters in housing stress refusing to be quiet about a crisis that is making us sick. We are the majority. We always have been. And for the first time, the dice are rolling in our favour.
But this budget didn’t flip the board. What we needed was the complete abolition of negative gearing. What we got was a get-out-of-jail-free card for the players already winning. ‘Grandfathering’ means the rules change only for new players. Existing players whose house-hoarding pushed rents through the roof, and made first home ownership a fever dream, get to keep their tax break indefinitely.
The scrapping of the CGT discount is this budget’s best card of Chance, and it does deserve to be celebrated for what it is: a genuine cultural signal. Australia has an unhealthy obsession with housing as a way to make money. We’ve built an entire identity around property investment as aspirational - the “great Australian dream” but with a property portfolio. Investors just want to ‘get ahead’. But ahead of who? Someone else. A parent and child. Anyone. ‘It’s the best financial decision you can make’, but only if you already have money.
Scrapping the 50% CGT discount begins to dismantle that. It states clearly: housing is not your wealth creation vehicle. It is a place everybody should be able to call home.
The revenue freed up by these changes must flow directly into public housing at scale. Not community housing. Not ‘affordable’ housing that isn’t even affordable. Public housing. Beautiful, accessible, publicly owned homes that people can live in for life, giving people the stability they crave and deserve.
I am a forever renter. I am on a decades long public housing waitlist. I would happily rent forever if I could live in a public home.
That’s the real crisis: governments have spent decades dismantling our public infrastructure, forcing people into private rentals that are unregulated, precarious, expensive, and exhausting. Meanwhile the Prime Minister, who exploits his upbringing in public housing for cultural currency, refuses to make real change. Our question to Albo is this: you know what a safe, stable public home meant for your life. Why won’t you give that to everybody else? No one should get seconds until everybody has a house.
This budget proves that when we organise, we win. But winning one card doesn’t end the game. We have more to do. A lot more. And renters - the millions of us locked out, moving constantly, paying too much, waiting too long - we are angry, and we’re done playing a game that was rigged against us from the start.
Everybody hates monopoly. So we’re organising to flip the board. And we won’t stop until everybody gets a house.
About the author
Chels Hood Withey (they/them)
Chels is a community organiser, and the founder of House You, a grassroots housing first organisation based on unceded Bundjalung Country in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Dedicated to organising the people power required for systemic change, so everybody gets a house.
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Thank you for this. I also wrote a deep dive here: https://ritajabrimarkwell.substack.com/p/housing-and-cost-of-living-relief?r=pacl0&utm_medium=ios
Unfortunately, while it seems to be a significant announcement for tax, the failure to impose property number limits of any kind on prospective negative gearing and invest more in social housing means that we can expect it to have very limited effectiveness in providing relief. Like the gambling ads reform response, it is an incremental step that still skims the surface rather than responding to unmet need.
The question is, what will the crossbench push for in parliament to improve this package.
Blanket changes to CGT are absurd. We should be incentivising investment in productive capital (ie shares) over property. Why discourage investing in shares??