Geoff Wilson founded Wilson Asset Management in 1997 and now manages around $6 billion for 130,000 investors. He has fought three tax campaigns against Labor governments over the past decade, and he is in the middle of a fourth.
In June, Parliament legislated the biggest change to Australia's capital gains tax in a generation: the fifty per cent discount replaced with cost-base indexation, plus a thirty per cent minimum rate on gains accruing from 1 July 2027.
Wilson is blunt about his own position. His funds are high-yield, so a shift away from growth stocks benefits them. He says he is campaigning anyway, because the people who lose are the founders, the employees paid in equity, and the young investors buying ETFs to save for a deposit.
In this conversation with Quillette Editor-in-Chief Claire Lehmann, he argues that Treasury never modelled the behavioural consequences: why it is now in a company's interest to pay out all its earnings rather than reinvest, why a young investor is better off trading than holding, and why a technology founder who had offered a returning expat five per cent of his company now has to offer ten.
CHAPTERS
00:00 "Growth has become a dirty word"
01:11 Intro ends
01:20 The fixed-pie assumption
02:20 A productivity round table, then a productivity tax
03:15 The modelling Treasury didn't do
05:20 "The highest capital gains tax in the world"
07:00 Why capital flees growth for franked dividends
08:35 What it does to founders and employee equity
10:10 "Carve out all Australian businesses"
10:55 "The government has been gaslighting the Australian people"
11:50 Four extra years to a house deposit
13:10 The one-in-ten-young-people claim
14:50 Why productivity is hard to explain
16:00 The industries where productivity can't rise
17:25 Superannuation, and why nobody trusts it
20:00 The maths: why companies should stop reinvesting
21:40 Why young investors should become traders
23:40 Ideology, or incompetence?
24:35 Policy engineered backwards
26:10 Wilson benefits from this tax — and fights it anyway
28:20 Why the business community stays quiet
29:20 The case for getting on a plane
31:20 Brain drain, and the Canva CFO
32:40 The UK precedent
35:20 A tax on the family home?
36:00 Can any of this be repealed?
37:35 Could this cause a recession?
38:40 43,000 new companies, and what they're really for
39:50 The grassroots campaign
43:10 Treasury versus Keating
44:00 Closing
