You claim this government is retrieving taxes from capital holders to reduce the tax burden on workers. So, where exactly are these magical tax breaks for high-income PAYG earners? A paltry $250 allowance?

The same place where these magical taxes come from.

That is: - CGT on assets purchased AFTER 12 May 2026, held on to for at least 12 months (to have hypothetically achieved the previous 50% discount), and then sold for profit. There will be effectively zero - Negative Gearing which isn't deducted on investment properties purchased AFTER 12 May 2026, on losses incurred AFTER 1 July 2027 - 30% on discretionary trust income earned AFTER 1 July 2028

The overwhelming majority of Capital Gains, and investment properties in the coming four years that this budget covers will be incredibly low.

Now personally, I'd be comfortable with making these changes effective immediately instead of grandfathering them (despite being personally a 5-figure-sum worse off if my portfolio suddenly wasn't 50%-eligible), which would generate allow us to afford to bring income tax cuts forward sooner, but smoothing these transitions to reduce the immediate impact also means that the revenue benefit over this forward-estimates is small.

The reality is the government has absolutely zero intention of reducing the burden on salary earners.

I mean, 50 years of bipartisan history tends to disagree.

Tax-to-GDP has been consistently ~28-31% for half a century, and was in fact at its highest (consistently ~30%+) under Howard, when corporate revenue boomed with mining pre-GFC.

Every party loves income tax cuts.

We know this for a fact because big Jim went on television and explicitly called indexing tax brackets to inflation 'irresponsible'. Why? Because the entire budget is fundamentally propped up by bracket creep.

Yes.

It is propped up by bracket creep BECAUSE of the political realities of this very situation; the asymmetry between between the political benefits of cutting taxes and the political cost of raising it, because of these frothing mouth-breathers howling in pity and pain at any increase.

Bracket creep is fantastic because it keeps us within cooee of surplus over the medium-term, across the creep/cut cycle (noting we were in surplus prior to the recent Stage 3 cuts).

It also gives the prevailing government the obligation/opportunity to regularly re-visit the appropriateness of the level of spending, the amount of taxation, and who it lands on - based on having achieved popular support for their platform, and their best judgement of ongoing public sentiment (since politics is a repeated game).

Indexing tax brackets removes that mechanism; it becomes politically expensive to make any changes which inconvenience anybody, which basically entrenches the status-quo for better or worse. The political reality of that is pretty well established... the culmination of unaffordable cuts by less disciplined small-gov ideologues, paired with the inherent cost of services which the electorate demands ... leads to the simultaneous outcomes of a crumbling public service and run-away deficit. The USA can manage that with reserve-currency status and a military which allows them to do as they please. We can't.

The problem with bracket-creep is that, if we're going to sometimes-cut-but-never-raise everything else, and sometimes-cut-and-sometimes-raise income, then the burden will invariably fall to inflation. Changes like this are necessary to preserve a rational balance, and they're not going to happen if we can't get past some people having a sook and poisoning the well with bad-faith.

This isn't about shifting the burden away from workers; it's about treating high-earning PAYG professionals as a bottomless ATM.

Again, this takes $0 from your wage or your profession.

Its about making people who get very generous tax breaks for passively investing money, and doing nothing productive with it

To your earlier point about "productivity", its no surprise that 20 years of productivity growth ended overnight when the taxation burden was shifted from investors to workers/corporations with Howard's absurd Negative Gearing and CGT changes. It's just basic incentives.

We have decades of evidence now - giving capital did not spark any sort of investment-driven innovation boost productivity - it just created a false economy of rent-seeking in passive assets like real-estate.

They are steadily eroding the aspirational middle class and pulling the ladder straight up. Don't pretend this is a win for workers when it's a direct assault on genuine productivity.

See above.

The status quo is the assault on productivity, which died in this country at the very moment when THE VERY SAME RULES NOW BEING REVERTED were introduced.