I have been writing about budgets for 12 years and for almost all that time the government has been claiming that it wants to do something about housing affordability.

But every policy successive governments have put up has been rubbish.

The best you can say is that some of them would have no effect on housing affordability. These are the best because many of them would actually make housing affordability worse.

The evidence shows this. Over the last 25 years house prices have boomed. Young people have watched as prices have run ahead of them, putting home ownership further and further out of reach.

But for the first time there is a policy on housing affordability that isn’t crap. An actual policy that will make a real positive difference.

What is that policy? Changes to the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing.

Negative gearing is to be scrapped for everyone who isn’t buying a new house. The 50 per........

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