CGT beginnings

With wage and salary earners taxable on virtually every dollar they earn from their work, sources from the Asprey Report (1975) through to the tax summit of 1985 identified the lack of a capital gains tax as a tax regressive unfairness in the Australian income tax system which then relied on a narrower tax base. Before the CGT, gains on investments made by their owners escaped income tax and allowed already wealthier people to step up their wealth untaxed where less wealthy typically working people who paid their taxes could not.

Still it would have been near unthinkable for the Hawke Keating government of 1985 to have introduced the capital gains tax, which then was a partisan political and controversial proposal, into the Australian income tax system without CGT relief on the family home following the tax summit.

In those days a greater proportion of working people and middle Australia owned their own homes. So the exemption now legislated as the CGT main residence (MR) exemption in Division 118 of the Income Tax Assessment Act (ITAA) 1997, then not thought especially regressive, was a political price the government then had to pay to have a constituency-supported capital gains tax in the Australian income tax mix at all.

The uncontained housing tax exemption

But the breadth of the CGT MR exemption has made the CGT MR exemption itself regressive.

The CGT MR exemption is unlimited and especially generous when compared to CGT relief given in other countries.

The CGT MR exemption has these characteristics:

• generally, where there is no income-earning use of a home and a taxpayer is or is taken to have occupied the home as their main residence while he or she has owned it, any capital gain on the home is fully exempted from the Australian CGT;
• there is no qualifying length of ownership period to wait before the CGT MR exemption can be applied to exempt CGT on sale of an Australian home – the owner can live there for a month, rent the property out for five years, go overseas, come back and sell the (former) home and claim the full exemption – see section 118-145 of the ITAA 1997; and
• a taxpayer can turnover any number of homes and keep claiming the exemption from CGT on every successive capital gain. In other words there are no limits on the amount of, or numbers of tax free step ups in, wealth a taxpayer can achieve with no taxation by selling each of their successive and possibly more expensive homes.

This has made Australian home ownership an incomparably attractive investment for tax reasons. This frustrates wider social housing objectives such as opportunity and ability for the populace to securely house themselves when they cannot afford to compete in the housing market especially as long term renting in Australia is not so secure either.

Sources of unaffordable housing

The CGT MR exemption has indisputably contributed to unaffordible housing both as a tax shelter, as a driver of demand for real estate and as an improver of the financial case to own an expensive home. To what extent is not for a tax lawyer, who is no econometrician, to judge. The CGT MR exemption may not even be the greatest contributor to unaffordable housing in Australia. Housing markets around the world are elevated due to the abundance of money injected into major economies by quantitative easing. But in Australia add:

• dark money laundered through Australian real estate attributable to persisting slack regulation of money flows into Australia, including continuing failure by government to commence the 2007 AML/CTF measures to expand the range of oversight of AUSTRAC to non-financial businesses and professions including the legal, accounting and real estate professions: see my 2017 blog – Sluggish anti-money laundering reform in Australia https://wp.me/p6T4vg-6J and The Lucky Laundry by Nathan Lynch https://cutt.ly/JCwVAyK;
• housing financialisation; and
• light and regressive taxation of housing in Australia;

to the reasons why Australian residential property prices have reached the unaffordable levels they have.

The wrong culprit

Light taxation has been widely canvassed in the media as a contributor to unaffordable housing but journalists and commentators frequently focus on the 50% CGT discount for investors and negative gearing as the tax system causes of unaffordable housing unfortunately ignoring the CGT MR exemption or even the various land tax exemptions that Australian state and territory governments extend which shelter owner-occupied homes from state taxation too.

The 50% CGT discount was an inexplicable 1999 adjustment to sound original design of the CGT in 1986. It replaced the indexation of cost (base) which was to ensure an investor paid tax only on a real capital gain after adjusting for inflation but at ordinary income tax rates so the CGT could work fairly and progressively as designed. The 50% CGT discount instead effectively and regressively reduced the income tax rate on investment capital gains made by property investors, as it turned out, during a period of negligible inflation which the 50% discount was meant to overtly but more crudely counter. Now inflation is back so a nuanced policy response may be to scrap the 50% CGT discount and to revert back to the 1986 indexation of cost which should never have been altered in the first place.

In contrast to the CGT MR exemption, the 50% CGT discount has a waiting period, 12 months – see section 115-25 of the ITAA 1997, which is not much, and is limited to 50% as a highest discount to individuals. Like the CGT MR exemption, availability is not limited or capped to those who qualify and this is a boon to investors in the property market although major investors and developers need to be tax wary that their property investment activity is not treated by the Commissioner of Taxation as a business of profit-making by sale with the consequences that:

• proceeds of sale of investment in housing become taxable as ordinary income;
• thus CGT relief, such as the 50% CGT discount, is unavailable – see section 118-20 of the Income Tax Assessment Act (ITAA) 1997; and
• their activities become an enterprise where they must charge the goods and services tax (GST) to buyers for reasons set out in Miscellaneous Taxation Ruling MT 2006/1.

Tax relief saving for a home?

The CGT MR exemption is of no benefit to someone who is saving for a home, but does not have a home yet, whom one would think would be the focus of a real and progressive tax exemption to house. Capital gains made on investments by someone saving for a home are not exempt from tax, and get no better than the 50% CGT discount I have maligned in this post, which is odd when it is understood the tax system gives already housed wealthier citizens, who may turnover a series of homes of increasing value and for increasing gains, full tax relief on each gain made on their homes through the CGT MR exemption.

For the CGT MR exemption to be fairer, and to discourage home buyers from taking on higher mortgages to get into the housing market where ruin may be more likely than gain, could the CGT MR exemption extend to capital gains made by persons who are saving for a home or who are yet to own home on portfolio assets set aside to buy a home they hold in the interim? Clearly the former First Home Saver’s Account scheme, which was an utter failure and repealed in 2014, was not ambitious enough and was a false move to help those accumulating what they need to buy a home.

A cap on the CGT main residence exemption?

A limit or cap could be put on the CGT MR exemption that a taxpayer can use to exempt capital gains on his or her home during their lifetime. This would take heat out of the housing market.

An arguably generous lifetime cap of $A 1 million would still bring in substantial additional CGT revenue that could fund social and universal housing and reduce the CGT MR exemption rort by those who take large or multiple full exemptions on their turnover of increasingly expensive homes. The CGT system already uses a lifetime limit in the small business CGT retirement exemption rules in Subdivision 152-D of the ITAA 1997 and caps now limit contributions that can be put into tax concessional superannuation on tax fairness and equity grounds.

A home turnover limitation?

In many countries in Europe a holding period of less than five years can cause capital gains on assets including the family home to be taxable. Tax relief cuts in where an asset is held for longer. Are their approaches something Australia should also consider when looking at tax exemptions and concessions for housing?

Challenge

There is no doubt changes that really improve Australian housing affordability and address inequitable and fiscally disastrous untethered tax exemptions will be politically fraught especially when there are so many interests vested in the present tax system who may lose with change. In the bigger picture lightly taxed property gains and unquarantined negative gearing deductions can be seen as scourges when proper taxation, orthodox monetary policy and extended oversight of criminal money flows could be used to re-balance the housing investment market with the social housing needs of Australia’s citizens.