Tag: Dear Betty

The Cleverest Bit of Marketing in Australia Right Now

Two founders in work aprons concentrate on detailed work at a cluttered workbench, while a relaxed man in a pale linen suit leans in the open doorway with one hand extended, palm up, doing none of the work but waiting for his share.
Never done a stocktake. Still wants his share.

Betty’s brother Kevin rang from Kiama last week, properly worked up. His daughter’s got a startup, a real one, the kind with late nights and not much sleep, and Kevin had just seen something online about the government coming after people exactly like her. “They’re punishing the ones having a crack,” he told Betty. “Did you see what they’re calling it? An aspiration ambush.” Betty hadn’t seen it. But she could hear that Kevin had already made up his mind, and that whatever he’d watched had done a very good job of helping him.

So she went and had a look. And what she found wasn’t really a tax story at all. It was one of the sharpest bits of marketing you’ll see all year.

We’ve spent two posts on GDP (See here and here).  Your house doesn’t count, and the country keeps shoving its money through the housing door instead of the door where things actually get built. If you missed those, the short version is: money put into a business grows the country, money put into an existing house just makes the house dearer.

Well, this week a bunch of young business owners turned that exact argument into one of the sharpest marketing campaigns you’ll see all year. And whatever you think of the politics, the craft is worth a look, because it’s a masterclass in how to win an argument before anyone’s checked the facts.

Here’s the setup. The budget proposed changing capital gains tax, the tax you pay on the profit when you sell something for more than you bought it. The change makes sense for the housing door, taxing property investors harder so houses stop being such a one-way bet. The founders even say they’re fine with that bit. The trouble is the same change also hits people who sell a business they’ve built. Same swing of the door, and it caught the workshop along with the houses.

Now watch what they did with it.

First, the name. They didn’t call it “proposed CGT discount reform.”

They called it an aspiration ambush. Two words, and you already know whose side you’re meant to be on. “Aspiration” is the good thing, having a crack, building something. “Ambush” is the sneaky thing done to you from behind. Stick them together and you’ve got the whole grievance in a phrase a headline writer can’t resist. That’s not an accident, that’s branding.

Second, the line. The letter says, near enough, we work the hours, we carry the risk. You can’t argue with it. It doesn’t mention tax rates or indexation or any of the stuff that makes your eyes glaze. It just plants a flag: we’re the ones doing the hard yards. Try writing a reply that starts “well, actually” to we work the hours, we carry the risk and see how you sound.

Third, and this is the bit I’d frame and hang on the wall, the silent partner meme. Some of them made fake ads casting the Prime Minister as a 47% shareholder in their business. One posted that he’s a bloke who has never done a stocktake and somehow still gets 47 per cent of the business and takes zero risk. That’s the silent partner gag, and it’s perfect, because it takes an invisible, boring thing, a tax on a sale that might happen years from now, and turns it into a freeloading mate who turns up at payday having done nothing. Everyone’s had a version of that bloke. You feel it before you’ve thought about it. Region Canberra

No wonder Kevin shared it. That’s the gag working exactly as designed, it travels from a screen in Kiama to a phone call with his sister before anyone’s checked a single number.

Fourth, the messenger. They didn’t wheel out grey men from a lobby group. They badged it founders under 40. Young, building things, the future. It’s much harder to paint a 35-year-old who started a company as a greedy fat cat, so the campaign chose faces that don’t fit the villain costume.

Put it together and you’ve got a textbook job: a sticky name, a line you can’t argue with, a meme that does the thinking for you, and the right faces out front. It went everywhere. Sky, the papers, an open letter straight to the PM. That’s what good marketing looks like, it makes its point feel like common sense before the other side has finished clearing its throat.

Now, here’s where Betty keeps her wits about her, because clever marketing is exactly the thing you should be most careful around. Being well-sold isn’t the same as being right.

Albanese’s comeback is, frankly, not bad either, it’s just nowhere near as catchy. He says the campaign is being run by right-wing parties and their allies, and that the meme misses how the tax actually works: it’s only paid when a business is sold, not every year, and most small businesses pay little or no capital gains tax when they sell. If he’s right, the “47% silent partner” doesn’t apply to most of the people sharing it. But “it’s only realised on disposal and most SMEs fall under the threshold” will never, ever beat a funny picture of the PM stealing half your business. The truer claim is losing because the catchier claim is winning. That happens a lot, and it’s worth noticing when it’s happening to you. Western Advocate Region Canberra

So two things are true at the same time. The founders have a real point, the tax change really does seem to clip the productive door as well as the housing one, and that’s the exact problem these posts have been about. And they’ve dressed that point in such good marketing that you should slow down and check it rather than just nod along. Both can be true. Usually are.

That’s the lesson, and it’s a bigger one than capital gains tax. The side with the better slogan isn’t automatically the side that’s right. They’re just the side that hired the better wordsmith. Your job, Betty, is to enjoy the craft, and then go and find out whether the thing it’s selling you is actually true.

Funny old world. We started by working out why your house doesn’t count, and we’ve ended up watching the country’s smartest marketers fight over the door it should’ve been going through all along.

Net zero, explained the way I’d explain it to Betty from Blacktown.

This is part of my Betty from Blacktown series. Betty isn’t a real person. She’s most of us. She’s spent her life getting good at one thing, and outside that one thing she’s a beginner like everyone else. I was a pharmacist, then I ran an organisation that trained young people to be confident communicators and trusted voices, and when I needed expertise I brought in specialists. So I’m Betty too, on every subject that isn’t mine.

This series is for people who aren’t specialists but want to understand the things that matter to them, including the things they never thought were important until someone a long way above them made a decision that turned up in their lives.
Net zero is one of those. It gets thrown around like everyone already agrees what it means, and most of us don’t. I didn’t either.

The only reason I’ve got enough confidence to write this post is that I’ve had the room in my life lately to think about it, turn it over, lose a bit of sleep on it. Betty hasn’t, because she’s flat out with everything else. That’s the only difference between us. I’m on the same learning curve she is, I just got a head start. And once you’ve worked something out, the decent thing is to share it. So here’s my go.

Think of a bath

Picture a bath with the tap running and the plug half out.

The tap is what we put into the air. The water draining away is what the planet pulls back out, the oceans and the forests soaking it up. Right now the tap is on full and the plug is barely letting anything through, so the level keeps rising and the bath is heading for the floor.

Net zero is the point where the level stops climbing. What’s going in matches what’s draining out.

Notice what that does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean we stop everything. It doesn’t mean we scrub the bath clean and undo the past. It means we stop making it worse. The level stops climbing. That’s a more honest and more reachable thing than people think when they hear the word “zero.”

It’s something we try for

I think of net zero the way I think of saving for a holiday. It’s an aspiration. Something you work towards knowing the date might move, the amount might change, life might get in the way. You don’t abandon the holiday because you might not get there by July.

The trying counts even when we don’t hit the number.

I know this one from the inside. I farmed dairy for years, and I worked with the beef industry too. So when the red meat industry announced in 2017 they’d be carbon neutral by 2030, I shook my head.

Not because the goal was wrong. Because the number wasn’t real. A target only counts for something if it’s within your power to pull off, and that one leaned on thousands of farmers choosing to come along, plus a stack of things nobody controlled. The one real lever they had was whether they could explain to their farmers why it was worth doing, and they reached for the headline instead. By 2025 they admitted they couldn’t make the date and pulled it back.

Dairy did the opposite. We set ourselves something we could actually reach and got on with it. On our own farm we lifted milk production and brought our methane down at the same time, both moving the right way for years. I used to say it in percentages on the radio and watch it slide straight off people. Nobody ever quoted the numbers back to me. But the day I said our family farm puts breakfast on the table for 50,000 Australians every day, people repeated that one back to me for years.

That’s the difference between a number and a picture. And it’s the difference between a target that’s a fantasy and a target that’s real. The fantasy one got abandoned. The realistic goal kept going.

So why isn’t it just happening?

The lazy answer is that people don’t care enough. I don’t buy it.

I bought some ham the other day. It had a fancy new strip on it, tear here, reseal there. I couldn’t open the thing. Ended up using the scissors like always. And I’d have paid extra for that packaging, the clever packaging that doesn’t work, when all I actually wanted was packaging I could recycle. That option wasn’t even on the shelf.

I didn’t fail there. The packaging failed. The easy thing, the recyclable one, was never offered, and then if I give up and bin it the story becomes that I’m the one who didn’t care.

People care plenty. What’s missing is the easy. The right thing is too often the hard thing, the thing with scissors and a surcharge, while the wrong thing is sitting there ready to go. Change that, put the easy option on the shelf, and watch how fast people “start caring.”

What about China? What about everyone else?

This is the one that comes up every time. Why should we bother when China won’t, when the bloke next door won’t, when half the world is heading the other way.

It’s a fair feeling. Nobody wants to be the mug who does the right thing while everyone else free-rides. But notice it’s a feeling about fairness, not about carbon. And the answer isn’t to argue about China. It’s this: you’re not a mug, and you’re not the problem. We built a whole world that rewards looking after number one and treats chipping in for everyone as the sucker’s move. Of course “us” feels like being taken for a ride. That feeling is honest. It’s just aimed at the wrong target.

The same goes for people in poorer countries starting to eat more meat, wanting the things we’ve had for generations. We’re in no position to tell them not to. But we are in a position to share what we’ve worked out, how to produce each kilo with less cost to the planet. Not “go without.” Here’s how. That’s a gift you can offer without being a hypocrite.

A word about how this gets explained

A huge shoutout to Les Robinson, who’s spent a career on how people actually change. His website is worth a coffee and a good long read. The kind of wisdom you find yourself using every day. Les speaks to Betty from Blacktown. He sees her as an equal, a fellow human being trying to do the right thing with the knowledge she has.

Outside your own narrow patch, you’re a non-specialist in nearly everything, same as me. Speaking language everyone can understand is the key. It’s recognising where the room actually is, and treating people as equals. The opposite, hiding good knowledge behind language you know the other person can’t follow, isn’t clever. It’s a wall.

So that’s net zero. A bath that needs to stop rising. A holiday worth saving for even if the date moves. A thing we try for, because the trying changes where we end up, and the alternative is standing back while the bath water goes over the floor.

I’ll be proud of us for trying. Give it a go.

With thanks to four people who’ve built their careers on being understood by Betty from Blacktown: Les Robinson, Dr Jenni Metcalfe, Gaye Steel and Greg Mills. 

☕ Enjoyed Betty’s take? She’s not done yet. Read all of Betty from Blacktown’s catch-ups here 

Albo the Silent Partner – a budget explainer for Betty from Blacktown

Somewhere in Blacktown, Betty is reading the budget papers. Her accountant isn’t answering. Her family’s at work. The Treasurer is on the telly saying “distortions. This post is for her.

G’day Betty.

You rang your accountant. He didn’t ring back. Your daughter’s working two jobs and your son-in-law’s on night shift, so the family WhatsApp is all emojis and no answers. Meanwhile every news bulletin has someone in a suit yelling about “indexation” and “distortions” and you’re left wondering whether the bloke on the telly just took something off you or gave you something, and whether you should be cross about it.

Let me have a crack. No jargon. Promise.

What actually changed on budget night

A week ago, on 12 May, Jim Chalmers handed down the budget. Three things matter for normal people:

One. From July 2027, when someone sells an investment, a rental, some shares, a business, the tax rules change. The old deal was simple: hold it more than a year, only pay tax on half the gain. The new deal: you only pay tax on the bit that beats inflation (the “real” gain), but with a minimum tax rate of 30% on whatever’s left.

Two. Negative gearing, where landlords offset rental losses against their wage, gets limited to new builds only, also from July 2027. If you’ve already got an investment property, nothing changes for you. You’re grandfathered in.

Three. Family trusts get a minimum 30% tax from July 2028. This is the bit that’s upsetting small business owners, because a lot of them run their butcher shop or tradie business through a trust.

What it means for you, Betty

Here’s the thing the government has been hopeless at saying out loud: if you’re a pensioner, the minimum 30% tax on capital gains doesn’t apply to you. Pensioners are exempt. That’s in the budget papers. Nobody’s said it on the 6 o’clock news because it doesn’t fit either side’s story.

If you own your home, your home is not touched. The main residence exemption is untouched. Sell the house, no tax. Same as it ever was.

If you’ve got a bit of super, your super is not touched. The CGT discount inside super funds stays.

If you’ve got a rental you bought years ago, nothing changes for you unless and until you sell, and even then the old rules apply to the gains you’ve already made.

So far, so boring. So why is everyone yelling?

Why everyone’s yelling

Because of the bit that isn’t about Betty. It’s about Betty’s nephew Luke who runs a life-coaching business, or your neighbour’s daughter who started a little software company in her garage. When they eventually sell, the government takes a minimum 30% slice. Small business owners have started making AI memes of Anthony Albanese photoshopped into their shop windows as the “silent partner” the bloke who didn’t do any of the work but turns up on settlement day with his hand out.

That’s the meme. And memes win arguments these days, Betty, whether we like it or not.

Now , the government will tell you there are small business CGT concessions that still let eligible owners halve or even wipe their CGT bill on sale. That’s true. They are real and they are generous. But Jim Chalmers spent a week not saying it loud enough, and Anthony Albanese spent a week saying “we’re returning to the pre-1999 system” as if anyone under 50 remembers what the pre-1999 system felt like.

The bit that should actually worry you

It’s not the policy. It’s the competence.

A week after budget night, Labor’s own backbenchers are telling journalists they can’t explain it. The Prime Minister himself admitted yesterday that the trust changes “will take longer to develop”, which is political code for we announced it before we’d finished designing it. He’s said he’ll bring the CGT legislation to Parliament “in a fortnight.” Everything’s in a fortnight. Nothing’s actually happened yet.

If your accountant won’t ring you back and the Treasurer can’t explain the policy on Insiders, that’s not your fault, Betty. That’s theirs.

What to actually do

  1. Don’t panic-sell anything. The changes don’t start until July 2027. You’ve got over a year. Existing assets are mostly grandfathered.
  2. If you’re a pensioner, breathe out. The minimum tax doesn’t apply to you.
  3. Keep ringing the accountant. When he finally picks up, ask him two questions: does anything I own get caught by the new rules, and if so, when do I need to decide anything? That’s it. Don’t let him bill you for an hour of jargon.
  4. Watch the trust stuff. It’s the bit most likely to change between now and when it’s legislated. If anyone tells you what the final rules are before about September, they’re guessing.

The bottom line

The budget isn’t the disaster the memes suggest, and it isn’t the masterstroke the press releases suggest. For most pensioners and most homeowners, very little changes. For people who own businesses they plan to sell, or who use family trusts, there’s real stuff to work through and the government hasn’t finished working it through itself.

Anthony Albanese has earned his new nickname. He is the silent partner, silent on the bits that would reassure you, silent on the bits that would honestly admit what’s still being figured out. Until he starts talking like a human being instead of a Treasury press release, Betty from Blacktown is going to keep being confused. And so will the rest of the country.

Hang in there. Ring the accountant on Monday. And if he still won’t pick up, ring me.