Jim Chalmers is a dramatist. He’s setting the stage for his big reveal

May 15, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

A dramaturg once explained to me that if you want to hit your audience with a particular emotion at the end of a scene, you have to start with its opposite. A scene that ends in a fight between a couple, for example, should begin with them laughing together, thoroughly enjoying each other’s company. Then, when the fight arrives, it is emotionally potent. On this basis, I draw two tentative conclusions. One: Treasurer Jim Chalmers is dramatist. And two: some time in the next two budgets, he will announce significant income tax cuts. Here’s why.

In explaining his tax reform package on Tuesday night, Chalmers outlined what I think is the budget’s most compelling underlying philosophy. “This will help rebalance a system which is more generous to assets than it is to labour,” he said, adding it would encourage investment in “productive assets”. This is the test against which the budget should be measured. It’s what gives the headline policies their meaning. It’s worth noting those ideas, reducing tax concessions for trusts and capital gains, and limiting the benefits of negative gearing, are versions of what Bill Shorten’s Labor proposed ahead of the 2019 election. But the sales pitch then was considerably different.

Shorten couched this all in terms of “fairness”, which boiled down to making wealthy (and some less wealthy) investors pay more tax. That is largely a politics of redistribution, but it........

© The Age