Rita Panahi:
Joining me now is Deputy Executive Director at the Institute of Public Affairs, Daniel Wild. Dan, the reaction to this budget must be alarming to the Albanese government. To give you an idea of how badly it’s been received, it has a minus a negative 25 net approval rating. The infamous austerity budget under Joe Hockey in 2014, that had a minus nine rating. This one’s minus 25.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah. Well, I think this may very well be Jim Chalmers’ last budget unless they’re able to rescue it. It really has gone down like a lead balloon and it’s not surprising for a couple of reasons. One is obviously the negative impacts of the policies they have. But secondly and more importantly, the budget has failed to recognise or deal with the big challenges facing Australia’s future. For example, it’s doubling down on the mass migration programme, which is the single biggest cause of housing unaffordability in Australia today. It is doing nothing about our anaemic economic growth. It is doing nothing about productivity. It does nothing to bring down the debt. It does nothing to bring down spending. In other words, it’s doing nothing to address the big long-term problems Australia faces. And so Australians aren’t dumb and young Australians aren’t dumb and they know when they’re being misled and that’s exactly what this budget does and that’s why it hasn’t landed with the Australian public.
Rita Panahi:
Now, The Australian newspaper has identified three political miscalculations that Treasurer Jim Chalmers has made with this budget. The government thinks Gen Z has given up on an aspiration. It believes generation X and millennials won’t feel betrayed by this budget and this budget unintentionally favours baby boomers.
Dan, what do you make of that analysis?
Daniel Wild:
I think it’s a pretty fair assessment. I also think this is what happens when you frame a budget for political benefit. Clearly what they’ve been doing is triangulating, trying to pay off different groups demographically. What the country wants and what the country needs is a budget for the country. A budget that will actually address the problems Australia faces, not trying to buy off each group in order to win votes at the next election. I think when you look at the younger generation, as I said before, they’re not stupid. They know that these changes are not going to make any meaningful difference. Even if you support the negative gearing and capital gains tax changes, by the budget’s own admission it’s going to do almost nothing to change housing supply in the country. So if you’re targeting housing supply, if you’re targeting the ability of Australians to get in their own home, guess what you’ve got to do? You’ve got to cut immigration and build more houses. This budget does neither.
Rita Panahi:
It doesn’t. And I would argue it does impact supply, but in a negative way, because you are pulling investors out of the market, you’re reducing incentive for property developers to build more because they have a smaller market to be selling to.
Now the capital gains tax issue, let’s have a look at some of the global rates. Let’s have a look at what companies, individuals would be paying in tax for investment gains across the world. You’ve got New Zealand and Singapore, zero tax on investment gains. Canada, 27. UK, 20 to 24. US, 20. Australia, the minimum rate Dan, 30, 47% is going to be the norm for a lot of people. Why would you invest in Australia if you’ve got other options?
Daniel Wild:
Well, exactly right. And this is just one piece of the puzzle. I mean, on top of the high taxing regime, we also have a lot of regulation and red tape, which makes it very hard for people to invest. We’ve also got massive energy costs now, which is something that historically has been a competitive advantage of Australia. It’s now a competitive disadvantage. So you add all of this up and you’re exactly right. Why would you invest in this country? And increasingly, people are saying they won’t invest in Australia. As a matter of fact, if you look at new private sector investment in our economy as a share of the total economy, it is at a near record low, or at least as far back as the digitised records go to the 1970s. So we need more investment, not less, but everything in this budget pushes it in the other direction.
Rita Panahi:
Now after Angus Taylor’s budget reply, Nine host’s Sarah Abo accused the opposition leader of blaming migrants for Australia’s housing crisis. And she also claimed that anyone in Australia who is not indigenous is a migrant. Let’s have a look.
Sarah Abo:
You’re tying migration to housing, but what are you doing about the current situation for Australians right now who, by the way, apart from Indigenous Australians are all migrants talking about migrants being the people who are causing this housing problem?
Rita Panahi:
Dan, your response to that?
Daniel Wild:
Well, I was born here. Does that make me a migrant? I mean, what other country do I have to go to? I mean, this is a problem with the debate-
Rita Panahi:
According to Channel Nine host Sarah Abo, you are. You’re a migrant. Unless you’re Indigenous, then you’re a migrant. Even if you’ve been here six, seven generations, even if you were born here, even if no other country is yours, you’re not authentically Australian, I guess, in her eyes.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah. So I think it’s a strange way of looking at it. Obviously migration is one of the big pressures on housing. I’m not saying it’s the only one. I don’t think that’s what Angus Taylor was saying in his budget reply address either. But obviously if the government is committing to bring in another 1.2 million people into the country, you don’t reckon that might affect housing affordability? Of course it does. Saying that is not scapegoating migrants because as I’ve said before, we’re the greatest nation on earth. I don’t blame migrants who wanted to come here. In fact, every single migrant that does want to come here is a vote of confidence in exactly how great we are.
But the point here is if you’re going to play this identity politics and division and saying that people who are not Indigenous Australians are all migrants, it’s just an absurdity and I don’t really understand what she’s driving at.
Rita Panahi:
Yep. Shows you how out of touch much of the media is with the Australian population. Now let’s talk about One Nation. They’ve recruited former Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes and ex party Vice President Teena McQueen. Dan, Pauline Hanson’s hinted that the pair could potentially run in next year’s New South Wales election. Is this a boost for the party or are they becoming like every other political party? Because one of the, I guess, charms of One Nation was their candidates had such diverse backgrounds, non-political backgrounds in many cases.
Daniel Wild:
Well, I think it’s a fair point. It can cut either way. If you are the man on the street or the woman on the street and you’re thinking about who to vote for, I don’t know whether this makes a huge difference either way, to be honest with you. I think that those who are supporting one nation are largely doing it because they support Pauline Hanson and they believe that we need to have radical change through the system. I don’t know whether this really changes it massively one way or another. That seems to be the case in the UK, by the way, with Reform. They’re still very successful. They’ve taken on a whole bunch of ex-Tories. But at the recent council elections, they performed very strongly, which suggests to me it doesn’t really matter that much either way. I think what Australians are going to be looking at the policies that are on offer, this will sort of come and go. I’m not sure it makes a huge difference in the overall scheme of things.
Rita Panahi:
I think Teena McQueen will be a great asset, but Hollie Hughes, she was in Sussan Ley’s camp. So that’s a smaller Liberal. Making the transition to One Nation seems a bit odd to me. Now let’s look at this social media own goal from Housing Minister Clare O’Neil, who posted this clip of Pauline Hanson giving her a little side eye.
Clare O’Neil:
$3 billion. This is going to be … Dollars. This is going to be-
Rita Panahi:
Dan, she captured that with, “If Pauline doesn’t approve, I must be on the right track.” But I don’t know. The clip makes Pauline look pretty cool and Clare looks a little lame. I don’t know why she posted that. I had a look at the comments and they’re all roasting her.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah. I don’t know what the theory behind this was. I agree with you that Pauline looked better off than Clare O’Neill in that clip. So there’s that. I think when you look at it, you said that Clare O’Neil was the housing minister and she’s zero for 21 in terms of meeting the monthly targets under her own National Housing Accord. So you would’ve thought that that would be the thing that you’re going to address.
The other point here is not just Labour, but others have wanted to have a go at Pauline Hanson and saying, “Oh, well, if she doesn’t like it, I must be doing the right thing.” But okay, maybe two or three years ago if you had of said that maybe it would’ve landed a bit better. But have you seen the polls, Clare? One Nation is winning a lot of Labour voters. A lot of Labour voters are going to one nation. So I would be very careful even just from a political perspective at what you say.
Rita Panahi:
And Pauline Hanson’s net approval rating is significantly higher than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. So again, that would be something to take into account before having a go at her personally. Now, Dan, this is a classic in Victoria only story. A controversial labour hire firm called Women in Construction is at the centre of the latest Big Build scandal. The age reveals the firm had secured substantial taxpayer funded contracts representing itself as a woman-led supplier of female workers despite the company being owned by a male serial domestic violence abuser and previously managed by a male drug trafficker. The CFMEU had successfully demanded that contractors on rail project sites sack a labour hire company that was not aligned with the union and instead employ Women in Construction.
Dan, the major transport infrastructure agency was warned that this change would mean up to a 20% increase in labour high costs, but the project managers complied with the union demand. No wonder this state is broke.
Daniel Wild:
Well, it’s hardly surprising. You’re right to say that this is an only in Victoria story. The more that we find out about these construction projects and the Big Build in particular, the worse it gets in terms of the cost blowouts in terms of the favours that are done. I mean, the unfortunate thing here is it’s the Victorian people that are paying the price. And not just the Victorian people, by the way, because unfortunately what happens in Victoria doesn’t stay in Victoria. So as the Victorian economy goes down, it’s dragging down the rest of the nation. We’re already getting bailouts from the federal government and that’s only going to continue. So I think people, the more they learn about this, the more they understand what exactly is going on, the more they are quite understandably turning away from the state government.
Rita Panahi:
Yep. There’s a reason why this state has the biggest debt of any state in the country, it’s decisions like this and there’s plenty others just like it. Dan Wild, thank you so much for your time tonight.
This transcript with Daniel Wild talking on Sky News Australia from 18 May 2026 has been edited for clarity.
