She's On The Money - Negative Gearing Is Dead, Unless You’re Already In. Jim Chalmers Explains Why Young Australians Miss Out

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

The federal budget has dropped… and Australians have opinions. So Victoria sat down with Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, immediately after the budget announcement to ask the questions everyone actually wants answered. From negative gearing and capital gains tax changes to the cost of living crisis, fuel prices, housing affordability, tax cuts and why blueberries suddenly cost what feels like a small mortgage repayment. They also get into the political backlash surrounding the budget, why the government changed its position on housing tax reform, whether Canberra is disconnected from how tough things feel financially right now, and what Treasurer Chalmers says Australians fundamentally misunderstand about the federal budget. There’s also unexpected chat about ChatGPT, air fryers, pocket money, coffee machines, influencers, and what it actually feels like to hand down a budget while the internet calls you “The Jim Reaper.” If you’ve been trying to make sense of what just happened in Canberra, this is the budget breakdown you actually want to hear. Join our Facebook Group AKA the ultimate support network for money advice and inspiration. Ask questions, share tips, and celebrate your wins with a like-minded crew of 300,000+.And follow us on Instagram for Q&As, bite-sized tips, daily money inspo... and relatable money memes that just get you.Acknowledgement of Country By Nartarsha Bamblett aka Queen Acknowledgements. The advice shared on She's On The Money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances. She's On The Money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. If you do choose to buy a financial product, read the PDS, TMD and obtain appropriate financial advice tailored towards your needs. Victoria Devine and She's On The Money are authorised representatives of Money Sherpa PTY LTD ABN - 321649 27708, AFSL - 451289.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello my friends and welcome to She's On The Money. I am Victoria Devine and around here we are all about making money a little less overwhelming. We have a community of more than 300,000 people, we have podcasts and blogs, we also have freebies like budgeting tools and investing cheat sheets to help you feel more in control of your financial future. She's on the money. She's on the money. My name is Natasha Bamblett. I'm a proud First Nations woman and I'm here to acknowledge country. Hello, beautiful friends. We gather on the lands of the Aboriginal people. We thank,

acknowledge and respect the Aboriginal people's land that we're gathering on today. Take pleasure in all the land and respect all that you see. She's on the Money podcast acknowledges culture, country, community and connections, bringing you the tools, knowledge and resources for you to thrive. Hello and welcome to She's on the Budget, the series where we break down the federal budget in a way that hopefully makes you sound smarter at brunch, in the group chat or aggressively pacing calls wondering why blueberries now require a payment plan. I'm Victoria Devine and joining me today is the Treasurer of Australia, Dr Jim Chalmers. Very kind of you to have me on your show. Thanks heaps.

I am very much looking forward to sharing this time with you. I know it's compressed so I'm going to try and be speedy. But before we get into the economy, the budget and the fact that Australians do probably need to take out a small business loan to be able to fill up their car at the moment. I want to address what I'm going to call the elephant in the room. That's that the internet has a lot to say about you. They're quite colourful. I was reading some headlines, and based on those headlines,

you're either a visionary reformer, a communist, Jim Reaper, which personally I found quite creative, the man who killed negative gearing, or personally, you're the man responsible for ruining Christmas lunch conversations for every property investor in Australia this year. Wow, I haven't seen all of those headlines. They're good, aren't they?

How do you feel about criticism like that flying around? I used to find it tougher than I do now. I think now if you're a Labor Treasurer handing down a budget with a bunch of changes in it, then if you're looking to some of those outlets for positive headlines, you're kind of barking up the wrong tree. And I think like most Australians,

I've got more important things to worry about than some of those headlines. I think more and more people are getting their news from people like yourself rather than from some of those traditional sources. I do feel like it feels a little bit more balanced to sit down and be like, what did you actually mean by that? But I also likened the budget earlier today with Albo to it feeling like a wedding. And I feel like the budget for you must have felt like you were hosting a wedding because half the guests leave furious at the seating chart. no matter what you do during a wedding someone is going to be upset do you think that's pretty accurate i hadn't thought about it that way to be honest but uh people dress up i guess uh my

my young fellow came down from uh from logan for the event and i don't think i've seen him in a button-up shirt for a long time that isn't a school uniform so people dress up so there's a dress code it's it's like a wedding in that regard and no phones uh no phones temporarily or at least maybe sneaky phones um just during the reception of course right it's uh it's not festive like a wedding um but it's uh yeah it's a big occasion and uh and people are uh yeah people come from all corners of the country for it now treasurer before we get into some heavy stuff we always start with a money story on my show because we all have one and it shapes how we spend save and think about money what is your earliest memory of money I was thinking a bit about this the other

day because we haven't worked out yet how to do the whole pocket money thing for our kids and I was remembering when I was little we had we had two things we had one of those saver accounts oh yes and I'm I'm so old that it was a kind of a handwritten balance book you know that you'd bring in your 50 cents or whatever that's also what i had so right okay no of course not um so i remember that and i also remember um working out whether um whether my older siblings were should get more pocket money than me or not because they had bigger bigger expenses and they were older and so i can kind of vaguely remember those conversations yeah our theory in my house was 50 cents for every age you were is that right so you've got a pay rise every yeah that's like a

progressive system of uh pocket money i like yeah my mum said it was a quality and i just i'm not sure about that but we can come back to that now you mentioned before that your younger guy came down from logan and you grew up in logan and you've spoken before publicly about really understanding financial pressures firsthand which to be honest i think is essential for the treasurer of Australia do you think that changes the way that you approach budgets compared to people who've only ever viewed the economy through spreadsheets? Oh definitely I mean I for me everything kind of begins in my local community there's not not everyone here gets to represent the area they grew up in and I live about 900 meters around the corner from the house I grew

up in and so which my school friends think is pathetic but I think is cool. I think that's really wholesome we could rebrand that right um but uh so for me it's it's kind of everything and um i want my community to think that the work that they've sent me here to do is worthwhile so it's a it's a really big part of it i'm not trying to pretend that i'm necessarily different to other members who get to represent the area that they grew up in but for me it's absolutely central absolutely essential to how i think about the sorts of challenges that we're trying to help people through. So this year's budget, I would say, feels a little bit different to historical Albanese government budgets. Less, here's some free money, and more, okay, we're all actually

really stressed about money right now, and we're just trying very hard to not make inflation worse. What was the balancing act this year? Well, that's the perfect way to describe it. Every budget's got a series of fine balances in it, and this one feels like the degree of difficulty was a bit higher because we had the inflation challenge. We had people getting through a global oil shock. We don't know when the war in the Middle East will end or for how long the costs will be borne by people here in our country. And so more than the usual amount of uncertainty. And so what we tried to do was to say, okay, it's effectively a budget doing two things at once, helping people through a difficult period, setting the place up for

the future recognising that particularly in that longer term piece there's some difficult politically contentious changes that we want to make and I think the thing I'm proudest of in the budget if I reflect on it is really that you know some governments would have used what's happening on the other side of the world as an excuse not to do some of these bigger longer term things but we've done that at the same time as we've got a fuel security package and cutting fuel taxes for people doing it tough yeah and I think that Australians are able to understand global instability from an intellectual point of view like we get it we know what that means but from an emotional perspective I think it still feels very like well why is this conflict that's happening

on the other side of the world that we didn't have anything to do with suddenly making my wool workshop terrifying yeah I tried to acknowledge that in my in my budget speech actually quite near the front which is to say that you know Australians didn't choose this war or the consequences of this war they won't decide when it will properly end but they are paying a price for it in the meantime and so I am trying to acknowledge those pressures coming at us from around the world and but not just kind of rolling up into a little ball and hoping that everything goes okay helping people through the difficult period as well as setting the place up for the future. Yeah and with that you have announced some tax cuts a new working Australian tax offset a

fuel excise relief and some health care investments but if I am honest my community and I we're still feeling a little bit like we're drowning. Do you worry that the government can sometimes sound a little bit disconnected from how hard hitting things are actually on the ground? Yeah I mean obviously I hope not but I understand that you know any one of these policy changes whether it's any one of the five different ways that we are cutting taxes for people with a disproportionate benefit, positive disproportionate benefit for younger people, younger workers, I can understand that there's always an appetite for more help and more support.

And, you know, we've only been here four years, but we've cut income taxes five different ways. And there will always be people who would like us to cut taxes by more. We get that. Down the track, we'd like to cut taxes by more, but we can only do what we can afford. Absolutely. the question that I get the most or I have had the most over the last weeks about housing yeah I

have an incredible community of people who would love to own their first homes right um and I think we need to talk about it because respectfully Australians are losing their minds over this um usually when someone says respectfully there's an especially unkind thing that follows that but you didn't do that then so no I'm not that type of person in fact when I'm going to do that I will say quite directly, disrespectfully, because it's always a backhanded compliment, isn't it? But this budget made massive changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax after Labor had previously ruled them out. Now, I spoke to Albo about this this morning. And sometimes with new information, we have to make different changes and change our mind. And I think that's about

learning and about growth. But what has changed? Was this an ideological shift? Was it an emotional necessity was it an emotional necessity was it an economical necessity like was there a hyper political pressure like why are we going from saying we aren't going to touch that to hey guys we have to touch that yeah yeah understood I think the best way to convey how we landed here is at the election we had a focus overwhelmingly on building more homes we've still got that primary focus there's not enough homes in communities and not enough affordable options for people to get into the housing market so that's still our the main game but we we sort of it became increasingly clear to us that we needed to do more than that that we had to we

had to care as well about the composition of the market and over a long period of time the home ownership rates amongst young people have been getting worse and so I think for us in coming to this decision relatively recently it was more a sense of if we leave it for any longer it will get worse and it will get harder and it would have been politically it would have been much easier just to leave things as they were but we would have been doing that knowing that we'd be leaving these difficult changes for another generation to make and so we'd rather fix them even though that has invited all of the expected political conjecture. Yeah because I think that you don't and I'm not defending it because I don't speak for you but I think when a decision like this is made

you don't make it with the assumption that people are just going to take it willingly they're going to obviously be like well you said yeah and that can be really rough i've found that with that often the people who want to focus exclusively on that what they're really trying to do is they're trying to avoid the substance of the issue often and what i mean by that is people who don't want to contest whether the current arrangements are a problem tax arrangements in the housing market are a problem they'd rather focus on the politics of it or some of those comments and commitments that we've made in the past. I understand why people are interested in that but I would rather people focus on the substance of the change we're making. Yeah and

one thing I noticed in this year's budget was how much of the spending was actually tied to women's financial security which I love. So health care, child support, paid parental leave, work mobility, endometriosis clinics. Do you think governments are finally starting to understand that women's economic participation is economic policy. Yeah absolutely and we've got three big things going for us in this regard. First of all Katie Gallagher is the Women's Minister and the Finance Minister that helps. Second of all we've got in across our economic institutions now we've got for the first time women leading the Productivity Commission, the Treasury, the Reserve Bank, ASIC and in other areas as well and the third thing we've got going for us and i'm not trying to make a partisan point

on your uh podcast but the majority of our of the labor government is women and that that's not a that's not standard operating procedure in this joint for a very very long time and i think i think those three things combine to make a really genuine difference yeah so tell me what's something australians fundamentally misunderstand about federal budgets I think that most a lot of the spending is kind of baked in a lot of the decisions people think that we start a budget with a perfectly blank page and then we decide how much to spend on this or that whereas in reality there's a lot of decisions taken for you for example the indexation of the social security system you know that is automatic so that eats up a part of the budget when the

indexation happens and so a lot of what we're really dealing in budgets from one to the next is really a sliver of discretionary spending there's a lot of it that's already baked in an automatic yeah absolutely now I have less than two minutes left with you because you are a booked and busy man and with Albo and Katie this morning I did what I did on my first interview with Albo and that is a quick fire round I'm going to shoot at you some quick fire questions and it's just first vibes let me know okay keeping cash in your wallet uh that reminds me of the pm he does that exactly he's got a cash float basically in his 200 bucks in his wallet he showed me again yeah yeah i discovered this in uh on easter sunday once when we went to church and did it benefit you the

plate came around and i had to borrow 20 bucks off him there you go he's he's a man of the people Now tell me about ChatGPT. I use Claude rather than ChatGPT, but what I've noticed is in our lives, amongst the parents and peer groups, ChatGPT really seems to be the one that a lot of people are using, but I like using Claude. You're a healthy man. Do you use an air fryer? I don't, but I've been thinking about purchasing an air fryer. Been thinking about good purchase. What do you think of finfluences?

Finfluences. I think as long as people are providing accurate information, well-motivated information, that's a good thing. Obviously, there's a lot of people doing that. That's fine. And you've got to make sure that there's a way to avoid people who don't have your interests at heart online. Two more.

What about the cost of blueberries? We're currently sitting at $8.50 upon it. Yeah, yeah. I noticed that too. A big part of my health kick is berries. and I think a lot of people like me are substituting into blackberries. Fair. Do you make coffee at home? Yeah, absolutely. I've got a coffee machine.

I actually prefer now my home coffee because I've kind of perfected exactly how I like it. So have I. All right, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for listening to this bonus budget episode of She's On The Money. If this episode helped you better understand what the hell just happened in Canberra, send it to a friend share it in the group chat and make sure you're subscribed because we've

got more budget breakdowns coming very soon take care of yourselves and we'll see you next time the advice shared on she's on the money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances she's on the money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision if you do choose to buy a financial product read the pds tmd and obtain appropriate financial advice tailored towards your needs victoria divine and she's on the money are authorized representatives of money sherpa pty ltd abn 321-649-27708 afsl 451-289