It’s been a long time since I made my start in finance after university in 2008. I was working on the top two floors of Riparian Plaza in the back office of a prominent Brisbane stockbroking firm named Wilson HTM. Our team were responsible for settling the firm’s domestic trades and I started with issuer sponsored (held on SRNs) then moved to stocks held with margin lenders. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate that I was at the epicentre of the GFC here in Brisbane. I was settling the trades where the investor had borrowed money to buy the stocks. As stock prices started to fall, I was then transferring stocks to the margin lenders to avoid margin calls for clients. Up until then, the market was hot and the stockbrokers were kings. When I got the job, I thought this would be my path. The first rock in the road was a redundancy in September 2008.

After that, margin lending was frowned upon for retail investors in Australia and I was able to make a start in international settlements at Morgans. Here, our small team ensured the settlement of the firm’s trading activity in all stocks outside of Australia. This consisted mainly of stock holdings in the US, Canada and the UK and we also facilitated all the currency conversions for the trades. It was here that I realised just how much of our client’s trading activity was focused primarily in Australia. The international settlements involved quite a lot of work to process the trades but there really weren’t many trades in international stocks through to when I moved to Consulting at KPMG in 2011. I then became a financial advisor in 2014 and buyers agent in 2015 in Toronto, Canada then a stockbroker back at Morgans in Brisbane in 2018 and a listing agent at Pure Real Estate and Ray White Bulimba between 2020 - 2023.

I was there to see the fall of the stock market in 2008, I bought stocks in 2009 and witnessed their rise here in Australia then I sold them and used the profits to move to Canada were I learned funds management and financial planning. I was there to witness the rise of the Canadian housing market as a buyer’s agent through to when I left in 2017. When I stepped back into property as a listing agent in Brisbane, I worked mainly with investors and was there for the rise of the Aussie property market during the GFC. I was part of the industry when real estate agents became the new stockbrokers and Aussies became even more mad about property.

I say all this because I now spend my days selling Australian made watches with Swiss Movements at Adina Watches here in Brisbane. That’s a lot different than being a stockbroker, financial planner or real estate agent but but we sell what these people buy. Wealth, and its accompaniments. Aussies may wear less suits these days but we still appreciate a good car, watch or property. As we’ve all risen in wealth, we’ve learned to consume better quality goods. Our tastes have shifted from beer to craft beer to champagne and property investors have had the added benefit that their consumption in high end property has also lead to wealth growth.

In 2008, share market investors used leverage to top up their holdings. Many stocks essentially halved at the end of 2008 which hit everyone hard. By the time the market started hitting its stride in 2009, many were gun shy and unwilling to use leverage again. I was there to see all this, look at the target price of the firm’s stocks from the research department then do a quick check to see where the price was at its previous peak. I was a complete amateur but it became normal for me for stocks to double within a year then I would need to wait for the full 12 month period to sell them to ensure I received the 50% capital gains tax discount. My mentor, Marcel, would later say “everyone’s a genius in a rising market”. He was at an investment bank in Europe to witness the GFC. He witnessed a lot more bloodshed than me. This experience helped him define his strategy for building a hedge fund where you can make money in any market, even when it’s falling.

I don’t speak about finance anymore with many people but I’ve also had the benefit of regular chats with Marcel, one of the best minds in Australia when it comes to finance, economics and policy. Today, I’d like to run through a few of the underlying influences that have led to the Government making some changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing to increase revenue from capital, not just income tax. These changes significantly impact the two industries where I spent most of my career, property & finance. Unfortunately, the sentiment behind these policies is not new. Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty was published in 2014 and the film was released in 2019, along with the wealth tax recommendation, as below.

“What is the ideal schedule for a tax on capital, and how much would such a tax bring in? To be clear, I am speaking here of a permanent annual tax on capital at a rate that must therefore be fairly moderate. A tax collected only once a generation, such as an inheritance tax, can be assessed at a very high rate: a third, a half, or even two-thirds, as was the case for the largest estates in Britain and the United States from 1930 to 1980. The same is true of exceptional one-time taxes on capital levied in unusual circumstances, such as the tax levied on capital in France in 1945 at rates as high as 25 percent, indeed 100 percent for additions to capital during the Occupation (1940–1945). Clearly, such taxes cannot be applied for very long: if the government takes a quarter of the nation’s wealth every year, there will be nothing left to tax after a few years.

That is why the rates of an annual tax on capital must be much lower, on the order of a few percent. To some this may seem surprising, but it is actually quite a substantial tax, since it is levied every year on the total stock of capital. For example, the property tax rate is frequently just 0.5–1 percent of the value of real estate, or a tenth to a quarter of the rental value of the property (assuming an average rental return of 4 percent a year). The next point is important, and I want to insist on it: given the very high level of private wealth in Europe today, a progressive annual tax on wealth at modest rates could bring in significant revenue. Take, for example, a wealth tax of 0 percent on fortunes below 1 million euros, 1 percent between 1 and 5 million euros, and 2 percent above 5 million euros. If applied to all member states of the European Union, such a tax would affect about 2.5 percent of the population and bring in revenues equivalent to 2 percent of Europe’s GDP. The high return should come as no surprise: it is due simply to the fact that private wealth in Europe today is worth more than five years of GDP, and much of that wealth is concentrated in the upper centiles of the distribution.” Thomas Piketty - Capital in the 21st Century

Some countries, like Canada, have already started considering taxes on unrealised capital gains. Australia has just started the process of reconsidering capital gains tax as well as withdrawing negative gearing from existing properties. As our country ages and taxation revenue from income wanes, I expect that this is just the beginning. I also hope I’m wrong.

Now that the scene has been set, let’s look at some data. I would usually do all the data analysis myself however all these images were created by ChatGPT. It’s notoriously hard to get it to use consistent data throughout so apologies if you notice any errors. I’ll aim to keep the commentary to a minimum as the images show most of the story.

Property almost tripled between 2009 - 2026 while the ASX200 stock market index grew by 140%, with the majority of its gain between 2009 - 2020, as below.

As you can see above, the ideal trade would have been to hold shares until 2020 then switch into property to pick up the highest growth periods in each asset class. There will still significant gains available in some stocks, like Macquarie Group (MQG) which grew to almost 10 times its price in 2009 by 1 June 2026.

At the same time, some suburbs, like New Farm, outperformed wider Brisbane with a median price that is almost four times the 2009 price, post GFC.

When I was working with investors between 2020 - 2022, I sold a lot of units and townhouses as this was often the period where they saw the first significant capital growth in over a decade. As can be seen below, owning a unit in Brisbane achieved similar growth (140%) as holding the ASX200 index between January 2009 to June 2026. The difference is that the unit is probably higher leveraged than the share portfolio. If it’s already paid off, there’s also significant income upside in the unit, not just capital growth. In saying that, this was also the first time in a long time where this investor stock actually achieved decent capital growth rather than just yields. Price incorrect

The next trend was that there was also significant growth in regional areas like Ipswich & Toowoomba, as below.

Growth was also very strong at the Gold Coast & Sunshine Coast.

The below image shows that units in Sydney and Melbourne also grew strongly, with the Sydney median unit price of $1,150,000 now very close to the Brisbane median house price $1,220,000. Brisbane units incorrect

So, if units in all cities have more than doubled, what about median family income?

It’s clear that median income growth was surpassed by capital growth for houses and units.

Rents also grew as a percentage of median family income from 34.4% to 45.1% Check income data. So, it’s clear that income growth has been slow in comparison to capital growth. Now, let’s look at some demographics. Our working age population grew by 2.8m over the period.

The population over 65 grew by a very similar amount, 2.6 million. Without immigration, we would have higher growth in retirees than workers. In other words, we would have had higher growth in the number of people who have access to capital versus those still working to generate income and build capital assets.

We had total immigration of 4,639,000 from 2014-2019 and 4,485,000 from 2020-2025 when most of the price growth occurred. So, it doesn’t seem like it may have been a sudden population spike that caused the problem.

At the same time, median family household income Australia grew by 85% while unemployment dropped from 5.6% to 4.1%. We had more people and they were more employed.

Rents grew by between 118% - 142% over the period against income growth of 85%. Brisbane’s rents grew the fastest off the lowest base. So, what about interstate migration?

Between 2014 to 2019, we had 186,831 people decide to become Queenslanders. From 2020 - 2025, there was 340,515. We are the most popular state for Aussie migrants and we took in 82.26% more migrants between 2020 - 2025 than 2014 to 2019. There’s a popular story that people from Sydney and Melbourne move up here with wads of cash to buy property but it’s hard to consider the full truth. What is clear is that the migrants are working age, as below.

The good news is that we’re not like Florida. People don’t move here to retire, they move here to work and raise families. So, we’ve had interstate migration and overseas migration. Have we also seen a growth in housing supply?

According to the data above, we saw housing supply in Brisbane grow faster than population. We also know that people showed a preference for houses over units and townhouses during the covid period so how does that look?

We also saw a larger percentage growth in the number of houses than the population here in Brisbane. in June 2026, there was 1 house to every 2.79 people.

Over the period, we also saw the number of people per household fall from 2.9 in 2009 to 2.48 in 2026, so we had more dwellings with less people in them.

We also saw an increase in the percentage of rental properties from 28% in 2009 to 33% in 2026. So, rents increased while the proportion of investor owned properties also increased.

Across Australia, the percentage of population that owns 2 or more properties increased from 6.3% to 10.8%. There was also a significant increase in rental properties for retirees, as below.

It’s when you start to look at net worth that you see the most significant change. in 2009, there were 387,000 Aussie with net worth higher than $2m. That’s now more than tripled to 1,241,000. So, is it all capital growth or have some incomes also risen?

There are now 58,100 more people in Brisbane that make more than $250,000 or more than there was in 2009.

The number of people making $500,000 or more has tripled since 2009 to 21,900 people.

During periods of high inflation, we can expect to see wages growth but it’s clear that it’s the high income earners who have won in this scenario (check data 0- current inflation is too low)