Reflections on the Budget from a Gen Z perspective
Written by *Matilda Cheshire and Posted on Saturday 16 may, 2026
In this article, Gen Z’s Matilda Cheshire shares her perspectives and reflections on the newly announced Federal Budget. Writing for the Sydney Times, she joined a public forum on Wednesday where the Federal Member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, took questions from the public.
The Labor government has said this is a budget directed at Gen Z.
Economists, politicians, and content creators see it differently.
The front page of The Australian disagrees, calling Gen Z the victims of the tax changes and the budget an assault on aspiration.
The Sydney Morning Herald broke down the benefits of the budget for each generation. The number one, first- listed benefit for Gen Z was defence spending.
The 2026-2027 budget promised help for a generation grappling with the gap between their lives and their parents;. Paying off university debt, owning a home, or
just affording groceries — basic milestones — are a struggle for us. We were hoping this budget would be the thing that changed it.
This is a tax-focused budget
The changes to Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and negative gearing have been the focal point of this budget.
The government has touted this as the rescue raft for housing, by lessening the tax benefit of property ownership. The idea is to stop a landlord with a portfolio of investment properties, backed by accountants and tax advantages, from turning up at the same auction as a 29-year-old nurse buying her first home and simply outbidding her into oblivion.
But Dave Marchese from Triple J, Australia’ss national youth radio channel, says his listeners feel they have nothing to aspire to now. He is referring to the grandfathering
effect placed on these changes, which makes them effective only from now on. The government has told people who already own investment properties they can continue to negatively gear.
In other words, the rules only change for people who have not bought yet — which is exactly us.
When Marchese says his listeners see this as older generations pulling up the ladder behind them, he means this literally.
The people who already climbed the property ladder using these tax perks get to keep them. We do not get the same handholds they had. The ladder has not been removed — it has just been pulled up out of reach once the people already on it were safely up.
Allegra Spender, Member for Wentworth, hosted a budget debrief and took questions. It was a bold and honourable move. Wentworth is one of the wealthiest electorates in the country, and many of her constituents had come to her before the budget with clear demands — on housing, on tax, on the gas levy.
As an independent, Spender does not sit in government and cannot introduce legislation herself. What she can do is advocate loudly in parliament, ask hard questions during question time,
move crossbench amendments, and make the political cost of ignoring her electorate as high as possible for the government. She had done all of that. But she would still have to face her constituents and explain what had and had not made it into the final budget.
Spender spoke to multiple economic experts before the budget and explained the tax reforms to her audience well. Based on the economists she consulted, she reported an expected 2% reduction in house prices and believes the tax changes will support first home buyers against investors.
She described the reforms as honestly quite complex changes,with;bits we like,bits we don’t, and bits we’re still getting our heads around; — and this was after spending multiple days in the budget lock-up.
Spender also ran quickly through a handful of other policies, giving her listeners a scorecard to take away. The Melbourne rail loop: a bad idea. The diesel fuel rebate: also a bad idea. Food support: ignored. The arts sector: nothing. Bracket creep: not addressed. She moved through them efficiently, trusting her audience to form their own views.
Start-ups and small shareholders
The attendees of Spender’s Zoom call asked repeatedly about the tax reforms, but Spender welcomes the push away from property as the default path to wealth in this country.
Her argument is that Australia has become too fixated on housing as the only way to get ahead. You buy a house, the house goes up, you borrow against it, you
buy another one. That cycle has crowded out other kinds of wealth creation.
“She remains firm that real economic growth lies in building exciting businesses— in backing people who take risks, start things, and create jobs — rather than sitting on land and waiting!”
But the CGT changes do not only affect property. They hit shares too. T
he current 50% CGT flat discount is gone, replaced by an inflation-based indexation system. The catch is a minimum floor of 30%. That is what is going to sting us.
Consider a young person whose hands are tied by the cost of living, who decides to try their luck in the share market.
Shares are one of the few home-made honey pots available to us — you drip money in slowly over years, the market does its thing, and eventually you crack it open when it is time to buy a house. It is not glamorous but it is a plan. Today, you can even buy crypto at an Ezy Mart convenience store alongside your vape, so the barrier to entry has never been lower.
The confusion comes from what the 30% minimum actually means in practice.
Normally, the tax you pay on a gain depends on your income tax rate — if you earn less, you pay less.
The minimum floor cuts across that. It means that even if your nominal tax rate is, say, 19%, you still pay at least 30% CGT on gains from property or shares.
You could end up paying more CGT than someone on a higher income who happens to have their gains structured differently.
That is the bit that is hard to get your head around, and hard to explain to someone who just bought $200 worth of crypto at a servo.
Same goes for running a business through a trust structure — the 30% minimum applies there too.
Big bad gas tax (apparently)
One aspect of the budget that disappointed Spender was its shying away from introducing a tax on our natural gas exports. Calls for this policy change have flooded
social media, spearheaded by Independent Senator David Pocock and supported by political content creators like Punters Politics (Konrad Benjamin). The pressure is
palpable in the comment sections of any MP’s posts, particularly the Prime Minister’s. Comments like tax the gas companies or we can’t afford rent and LNG exports made $90 billion last year, where’s our cut?have become a fixture under almost every budget-related post.
Punters Politics was rejected in his application to attend the budget lock-up in Canberra. He has been talking to his followers, whose outlook remains bleak. We punters in the punterverse… we can’t afford stuff. A gas tax was never on this budgets radar, but he remains yelling into the omniverse for a policy that could deliver Australia an enormous windfall.
Australia’s national anthem tells us that our land abounds in natures gifts. Punters Politics wants to know why we are gifting those gifts to multinational gas companies for next to nothing.
Punters Politics is less riled up about the CGT changes on housing specifically than his contemporaries, though. He is willing to wear those if it means his kids can afford
a house one day. A surprisingly long view for someone who makes his living on outrage.
The government won’t even clean up its own mistakes.
Uni fees
A popular play with politicians around election time is to cut HECS debts to win over our generation in a single swoop. This budget didn’t advance those cuts at all.
Even after admitting the failure of the Jobs-Ready Graduates package, no moves have been made to get rid of it. The program tried to herd students towards fields like
STEM and medicine by cutting the cost of those degrees heavily. It failed, Spender explained, because in her view students don’t choose their degree based on cost. The
program ballooned the cost of arts degrees and left students with enormous debts.
If this budget were genuinely Gen Z targeted, why not start there?
We put this to Spender, who said she had raised it with Education Minister Jason Clare. His response was that reverting the changes would be too expensive for a government
whose spending blowouts are already under scrutiny.
So there it is.
The government that broke it won’t fix it because it can’t afford to. And we’re the ones left paying.
What are the naysayers saying?
Angus Taylor, as leader of the opposition, delivered his budget reply. It was not short on ambition.
The opposition appears to have noticed that One Nation’s polling has risen, because they have proposed serious immigration cuts. Their argument is that high migration
levels are outpacing the number of homes being built each year, and that this is a root cause of the housing crisis. Their plan is to tie migration intake directly to housing
construction numbers, promising what Taylor called one of the biggest cuts to immigration in Australian history.
Taylor doubled down, vowing to remove what he called Labors handouts for non-citizens. Under the opposition’s proposal, even permanent residents who have not yet
obtained citizenship would lose access to NDIS, JobSeeker, Youth Allowance, Family Tax Benefit, and more.
It is worth noting that many migrants do not pursue naturalisation because the process is expensive, complex, and demanding — requiring English language testing and a civics exam — and because some home countries do not permit dual citizenship.
Michelle Grattan, a University of Canberra Fellow writing in The Conversation, suggested Taylor may have concluded his party is in such deep trouble that throwing everything at the budget reply was worth the risk. The strategy seems clear: move toward One Nations ground on immigration, in the hope of winning back voters who drifted that way and might still be persuadable.
Shake it off, Tay Tay
Taylor also rolled out tax reforms of his own. His focus is bracket creep — the phenomenon where inflation-driven pay rises push workers into higher tax brackets without actually making them wealthier. Your salary goes up, your tax rate goes up, but your purchasing power stays the same. It is a stealth tax increase, and it hits lower earners the hardest.
The opposition’s plan is to index tax brackets to inflation, starting with the two lowest brackets, which are full of Gen Z’ers. Under their model, lower earners would see an
extra $250 in the first year, growing to over $1,000 by the fourth year.
Grattan notes in The Conversation that inflation-linked indexation has only been tried once before in Australia — in the 1970s under Malcolm Fraser. By 1979, Fraser was already moving to abandon it.
The contrast between the two approaches is stark. The opposition’s tax plan would put money in our pockets now.
The government’s approach to tax — particularly the CGT and negative gearing changes — might benefit our kids, or our kids;kids, if it genuinely cools the property market.
For us, right now: not particularly.
Where to cast your eyes now
The Treasurer’s major announcements are proposals — for now. Lobbyists, economists, the media, and maybe even us Gen Z’ers will have a chance to push for
changes before any of this becomes law.
You can follow the progress of the legislation on the Parliament of Australia Bills and Legislation page at aph.gov.au.
