Meanwhile Anthony Albanese says tax reforms ‘make system fairer’ and tells 7.30 the housing market was ‘broken’. Follow today’s news live

Chalmers defends house price forecasts

The government has been facing some heat over the cooling house market around Australia with falling auction clearance rates, and forecasts that house prices in Sydney and Melbourne could fall more than $100,000.

Auction clearance rates in Brisbane came up on the weekend, if you compare the preliminary numbers from the week before. They also came up in Adelaide. They came up nationally in aggregate, as I understand it. But in Sydney and Melbourne, we saw some softness there, that actually predated the budget announcements.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to replace one big distortion that Howard and Costello introduced when they made that big policy mistake in 1999 and ruined the housing market for too many people, especially young people, doesn’t make sense to replace that big distortion with another big distortion.

And so we’re applying this CGT discount – there’s still a discount, just calculated differently to reflect real gains – we’re applying it fairly and neutrally across the board so that we don’t introduce another big distortion and repeat the mistakes.

Some people think that we’re stuck in the past and our policies need to resonate with the Australia of today and the future. So I think it’d be a really good time for us to revisit our values.

If things aren’t resonating, and if people are actually latching on to our policies and believing in that, but they’re not wanting to vote for us, then maybe we need to do something about the brand,

I want us to have more cut-through on our policies. I worked for John Howard back in the day, and my patch, we were the Howard battlers, we’re the Menzies Forgotten people, and we’re Tony Tradie. So we are pretty much the heartland of Australia. And when the heartland of Australia tells you that you need to get more cut-through to get more voters on your side, then you need to listen to the people.

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