Dear Austaxpolicy contributors and friends,

The highly anticipated 2026-27 Federal Budget will be delivered by the Treasurer on Tuesday, 12 May 2026. As in previous years, Austaxpolicy will host a Budget Forum throughout May, providing informed analysis of tax and transfer policy related to Budget 2026-27.

This year’s Budget is expected to deliver tax reform of a kind that we have not seen in a generation. In the lead-up to the 2026-27 Budget, public discourse has focused on proposals to address intergenerational inequity, wealth inequality, and housing affordability. The recent Senate Inquiry on the Operation of the CGT Discount found that: ‘the concessions provided by the capital gains tax discount, in combination with negative gearing, have skewed the ownership of housing away from owner-occupiers and towards investors,’ and that the ‘benefits of the capital gains tax discount are also unequally distributed, with implications for income and wealth inequality and intergenerational inequality’.

We warmly invite you to contribute to this year’s Budget Forum. We welcome articles that reflect on the current state of Australia’s tax and transfer system, as well as analyses on tax and transfer measures announced or highlighted in the Budget. We also encourage articles on measures that, in your view, the Budget should have included but did not.
Our usual Austaxpolicy articles range from 800 to 1200 words, but we would be happy to accept shorter posts for the Budget Forum. Authors should explain technical terms and avoid jargon and acronyms as far as possible. Analysis, statistics and data should be supported with appropriate sources provided as hyperlinks, rather than references. Assuming there is no duplication, we would be happy to consider multiple articles that take different approaches to the same topic.

If you are interested in contributing, or you are writing an article on the Budget for another outlet and are interested in co-publishing with us, please email us at [email protected] by 18 May with your brief proposal. Alternatively, send us your completed article any time in May. We are happy to accept pieces both before and after the Budget. Please kindly include ‘Budget Forum’ in the email subject line, so that we can ensure a quick turnaround. We plan to kickstart this year’s Budget Forum a week before the Budget is handed down on 12 May.
We look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Sonali Walpola, Helen Ping, John Minas, Todd Morris, Claudio Labanca, Jean You

Editors, Austaxpolicy

Mehvish Mehboob, Rosie Sewell and Ethan Zhu

Project officers, Austaxpolicy

Comments are closed.