Australian Labor’s Class War. By Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.

History is important. Under the heading “Sydney Rents Hit the Roof”, The Sydney Morning Herald on March 14, 1987, pointed out that “investors are leaving the residential real estate market because of a decreasing return on investment” caused by removal of negative gearing and the introduction of a capital-gains tax.

Even Bob Hawke admitted the link between the tax changes and rent increases. In due course Keating backtracked and reintroduced negative gearing.

Sadly, the Albanese government is easily the most ideological since the Whitlam government. …

Kill the kulaks!

A “kulak” was a prosperous landed peasant in czarist Russia. From 1929 to 1933 Stalin campaigned against anyone deemed to be a kulak, involving mass arrests, executions (about half a million), expropriation of property, and deportations of entire households to remote and inhospitable regions (two to three millions). Far left ideologues in Australia — including Anthony Albanese — were brought up on a solid diet of Soviet history. (I knew these people.)

The government did not accidentally set out to stop people investing in investment properties by getting rid of negative gearing. This was a deliberate policy informed by class-war ideology; it was intentionally aimed at Australians whom the Prime Minister and Treasurer regard as rich: those who own, or seek to own, investment property. …

Class envy prompted the Prime Minister to repeat claims that negative gearing was “taxpayer-funded landlord welfare”. Albanese may have studied economics at university but any reasonably competent student would recognise that negative gearing was, in effect, taxpayer-funded welfare for renters. Given that landlords simply pass on their costs to renters, tax deductions for the interest they pay end up benefiting renters.