Last week’s budget was described, by at least one prominent politician, as a shit sandwich. In the days since, my feed has filled up with variations on that theme. Angry posts from farmers and farming families, several of them quoting scripture, most of them warning that the government is now taxing Australians in life and in death.
There is no death tax in this budget. There is no inheritance tax. What there is, among other things, is the end of the pre-CGT exemption for assets bought on or before 19 September 1985. From 1 July 2027, those assets get a market value reset, and any gain after that date becomes taxable. For a family sitting on land a grandfather bought in 1972, that is a genuine change. The pre-2027 gain stays exempt, but the planning assumption that the asset would never attract CGT is gone.
That is worth being angry about if you are directly affected. It is not the end of civilisation, and it is not a death tax, but it is a real shift in the rules for long held family assets. The small business and farm CGT concessions remain in place. The 50% CGT discount is being replaced by cost base indexation, which is a return to how the system worked between 1985 and 1999. Trusts get a 30% minimum tax from 1 July 2028, with several categories exempt.
That is the factual picture. The emotional picture is different, and it is the emotional picture that gets shared.
The post that prompted this one quoted Proverbs 13:22, a good person leaves an inheritance to their children’s children, and built an argument that modern tax policy is in tension with biblical stewardship. It is a familiar move in rural commentary.
Farming gets framed as a sacred calling, a multi-generational legacy, the soul of the nation. The argument runs that ordinary commercial rules should not apply to it, because what farmers do is not ordinary commerce.
Here is the problem with that framing. A farm is a small business. It happens to involve land and livestock rather than dry cleaning or panel beating, but the structural features people invoke to mark it as different, capital intensity, weather risk, commodity price exposure, thin margins, succession planning, asset values shifting under policy changes, exist across the small business economy. A suburban café owner whose parents bought the shop in 1980 faces the same pre-CGT change as a grazier whose parents bought the property in 1980. Only one of them gets Proverbs quoted in their defence.
Farmers already have a substantial suite of concessions that other small businesses do not. The small business CGT concessions, the farm-specific rollover, farm management deposits, primary producer income averaging, fuel tax credits, drought assistance and the farm household allowance. By international standards Australian farmers are lightly supported. The EU and US are far more generous. But by domestic standards, against other small businesses, the deal is good.
Which brings me to the honest version of the argument, the one farm lobbies rarely make out loud because it undercuts the rugged independence branding.
The rebates exist because food has to stay cheap. Australian consumers pay one of the lowest proportions of household income on food in the developed world. That is not an accident. Production costs are subsidised at the input end. Fuel, finance, drought support, levies matched by government. The saving flows through to retail. Governments of both major parties have made the same political judgement for decades. It is cheaper and less visible to subsidise farm inputs than to let food prices float to their true cost. A $12 loaf of bread ends governments faster than a fuel rebate scheme that nobody outside agriculture understands.
There is a second piece, which is food security. Most developed countries support domestic agriculture for the same reason they support domestic steel or semiconductors. You do not want to be wholly import dependent for something essential. That is a legitimate public interest argument and it is the one that should be made.
What is striking is that this argument almost never appears in the angry posts. Instead the framing is persecution. City elites who do not understand us, governments that hate producers, taxes designed to crush the family farm. It is emotionally satisfying and politically effective, but it obscures what is actually going on. The rebates are not charity. They are not a moral reward for choosing a noble profession. They are a consumer subsidy delivered through producers, designed to keep retail food prices down and maintain sovereign production capability.
If the argument were made that way, it would be harder to dismiss. It would also be harder to wrap in scripture, which may be why it is not the version we hear.
The budget is not a shit sandwich. It is a set of policy choices, some of which deserve sharp criticism. Pretending otherwise does the people most affected by the real changes no favours at all.