Labor Stands Firm In The Face Of Real Estate Industry Fear Mongering

With the Australian Real Estate industry  planning to launch a fear mongering campaign around negative gearing. The Labor party is standing its ground. 

Speaking this morning Mr Shorten said “In Australia, over $10bn a year of taxpayer money goes to subsidise negative gearing. We’re not scrapping negative gearing entirely but we do want to do budget repair that is fair.”

To say the lest the Australian Real Estate industry campaign is nothing but short sighted and  basis less. The reality is that negative gearing is disproportionately used by higher income earners.

Labor’s policy will not effect those who currently have negative gearing in place meaning thee is no need for them to sell their properties. 

According to the ABC Factcheck site only 8 per cent of those who use negative gearing earn under $80,000. Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh has pointed out that the $80,000 figure is taxable income, is the income that has taken into account  after negative gearing has been taken out. 
The  negative gearing issue is complex and highly political. The ATO’s Tax Statistics for 2012-13 showed that taxpayers claimed a total of $12 billion tax losses from investment properties, and almost 1.3 million taxpayers had negative gearing.

As Saul Eslake wrote on The Conversation and republished here on RealNewsOne “Labor is trying to make it less attractive for investors to buy an established property after 1 July 2017. As a result, the prices of established dwellings should go up at a slower rate than it would otherwise – and from the standpoint of would-be home-buyers, this is a good thing.”