A funny thing happened on the way to the budget: changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing, which had for years been a no-go zone, are now looking likely.

One of the first times I wrote about negative gearing was in 2015 when I covered the then treasurer Joe Hockey appearing on Q A. He said negative gearing was needed because when the Hawke government scrapped it in the 1980s rental prices rose.

He was wrong (and to be honest, this was not unusual – a lot of my columns back then involved arguing Joe Hockey was wrong). While rental price growth went up in Sydney and Perth, it didn’t in Melbourne, Brisbane or Adelaide.

Rental prices also grew faster after negative gearing was re-established in Sydney and Brisbane.

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In Sydney and Perth, rental vacancy rates were low and thus rental prices rose – and would have risen regardless of what was done to negative gearing.

But the weirdest thing, aside from property developers and their lobby groups continuing to say negative gearing keeps rents down, is that we are now less than a month away from the budget and the mooted changes to negative gearing have barely registered.

The changes have been rumoured for a while, and yet the Liberal party has avoided the issue.

They did not ask one question on housing in the last sitting........

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