This week’s budget begins winding back tax concessions that heavily favoured property investors and wealth accumulation, while pairing those changes with new measures aimed at boosting housing supply and long-term budget sustainability.

The 2026 federal budget was delivered after a year of building expectations for bold reform.

Part of that buildup was last year’s economic reform roundtable. That highlighted a laundry list of ‘regulatory hairballs’ from the Productivity Commission, as well as opportunities to boost tepid productivity growth by supporting new industries and technologies.

And part of the buildup was fuelled by the expectation that the government – with its strong majority – would be in the position to make some of the tough tax and spending choices previous governments have put off.

This opened the door to reforming a tax system that is less efficient, less fair and less sustainable than it should be.

This week, the government delivered a broad and ambitious budget. It is meaningfully working its way through the to-do list for making Australia’s economy more dynamic and thereby more resilient. It tackles our largest spending pressures, and adapts our tax system to be less leaky and more sustainable.

Many of the measures were announced before budget night – lifting defence spending, reining in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and addressing fuel security, given the shock to global supplies caused by the Middle East war.

What remained was changes to the tax system, and how the measures together would shift Australia’s long-term budget trajectory.

The budget set its focus on Australia’s imbalanced personal........

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