The people who designed the 2026 Federal Budget have spent their careers inside the system they now control. That matters more than most budget coverage will tell you.
There is a question that keeps coming up in conversations with builders, tradies and small business owners in the wake of the 2026 Federal Budget.
It is not really a question about tax rates or capital gains thresholds. It is something more fundamental.
Do the people writing these rules have any idea what it actually costs to build a business?
It is a fair question. And the answer, based on the public record, is largely no.
The Career Paths Tell the Story
Anthony Albanese has been in professional politics for his entire adult life. His only experience of paid work outside of professional politics occurred while he was a student. After university, he moved through the ALP machine as a staffer, party official and eventually a member of parliament. From the time of his graduation until 1996, Albanese worked as a research officer for an MP, as a Labor Party official, and as a senior policy adviser. He has been in parliament ever since.
Jim Chalmers followed a near-identical path. He held a variety of state and federal government advisory roles, including being former Labor Treasurer Wayne Swan’s chief of staff. Prior to his election to parliament, Chalmers was the Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre and, before that, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer. His entire professional life, from university through to the Treasury, has been spent in publicly funded roles.
Neither man has started a business. Neither has hired staff from their own pocket. Neither has signed a fixed-price contract, personally guaranteed a bank loan, or stayed up at night wondering whether a slow-paying client is going to break their cashflow before the next progress claim comes in.
This is not a personal attack. Both men have had genuine careers in public service. But it is a relevant fact when those same men are designing tax policy that fundamentally reshapes the economics of building and selling a private business in Australia.
The profit made when a builder eventually sells their business is not a windfall. It is the deferred return on years of risk that was never properly compensated at the time.
The Budget Through That Lens
The 2026 Federal Budget has been described by Treasurer Chalmers as the most ambitious in decades. For many business owners, the difference in tax payable on a business sale under the new CGT regime runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the same sale price.
An open letter campaign launched by founders argues that the issue extends well beyond venture-backed tech startups, covering every small business that wants to become a medium-sized business and every medium-sized business that wants to become a big business.
That is a description that fits most residential builders in Australia almost exactly.
But here is the part that construction operators understand and Canberra apparently does not. The profit made when a builder eventually sells their business is not a windfall. It is the deferred return on years of risk that was never properly compensated at the time. It is the fixed-price contracts absorbed during COVID. The material cost blowouts. The liability that does not disappear when a project is handed over. The personal guarantees that sat against the family home for a decade.
When a builder finally exits, that gain represents years of compounded exposure. Taxing it more aggressively does not redistribute wealth from the privileged. It penalises people who took real risks and survived.
The Schumpeter Warning
Commentary linked to a recent Australian Financial Review piece on the budget referenced the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter, who warned that capitalism weakens when prosperous societies become so comfortable they forget where prosperity came from, and begin resenting the entrepreneurial class that created it.
The argument being made is not simply about tax percentages. It is about what tax policy communicates. It is about values.
A country might endure higher taxes for periods of time. What becomes more dangerous is something deeper: the creeping belief that commercial success is inherently suspect. That profit is morally dubious. That founders and business builders should quietly accept higher penalties for surviving years of uncertainty.
For builders, this framing is not theoretical. It describes the mood that has been building for years.
The same industry that built every hospital, school, road and home in this country is routinely portrayed in public discourse as reckless or broken. Builders who do the right thing get little recognition. Builders who struggle get scrutiny. And builders who actually succeed, who build a real business over decades and try to exit with something to show for it, now find the rules changed on them.
What People Who Have Run Businesses Actually Know
There is a practical gap between governing and doing that becomes very clear when you read budget documents.
Someone who has spent their career in government advisory roles understands revenue and expenditure as abstractions. They move money between line items. They manage budgets that are replenished annually regardless of performance. They have never experienced the specific anxiety of a cash position that does not recover if this month goes wrong.
A builder operating a small to medium business understands something different. They understand that margin is not guaranteed. That a variation not documented is a variation not recovered. That two or three projects going sideways simultaneously can end a business that took fifteen years to build. That the equity sitting in that business is not theoretical wealth. It is what they have instead of a superannuation guarantee and annual leave and a redundancy entitlement.
When someone with no experience of any of that sits down to write tax policy, the gaps show. Not necessarily in the mechanics of the policy itself, but in the signals it sends. In what it communicates about how the government views the people who actually take economic risks in this country.
A society that treats ambition as something to be managed and taxed into submission will eventually find fewer people willing to make the bet.
The Apprentice Pipeline Problem
There is a downstream consequence of this that almost never gets discussed.
The construction industry has a serious workforce pipeline problem. Not enough young people are choosing trades. Not enough apprentices are entering residential building. The industry needs a compelling story about what a career in construction can actually deliver.
That story has to include the possibility of building something. Not just showing up as a wage earner for forty years, but actually building a business, growing it, and one day having something to sell.
If that endpoint is taxed more aggressively, the story gets harder to tell. And if the people designing the rules have never experienced what it means to build from nothing, they will not understand why the story matters.
What Builders Are Actually Owed
Builders are not asking for a handout. They are not asking to be protected from competition or shielded from accountability.
They are asking to be understood as economic participants who carry real risk, create real employment, and build the physical infrastructure of this country. They are asking for tax policy designed by people who at minimum appreciate what it costs to make payroll, hold liability, and build something that lasts.
That is not an unreasonable ask.
The LinkedIn commentary circulating around the AFR piece made the point plainly. Civilisation advances because some people are willing to bet on tomorrow before tomorrow exists. A society that treats that ambition as something to be managed and taxed into submission will eventually find fewer people willing to make the bet.
For an industry already under pressure, already struggling to attract the next generation, and already navigating one of the most complex regulatory and cost environments in its history, that is not a distant philosophical concern.
It is a Monday morning problem.
And it is being decided by people who have never had one.
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General Information Disclaimer:
This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. Readers should seek independent advice relevant to their own circumstances before making any decisions.
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