The Albanese government has set aside two parliamentary sitting days for the inquiry into its proposed capital gains tax and negative gearing changes. Two days. For a structural reform to the Australian tax base of the magnitude this legislation contemplates. Senator Dave Sharma, on Sky News on the fourth of June, put what was always the right number on the question. Six to eight weeks. Five to six days of public hearings. Time for submissions to be made and time for the parliamentarians on the committee to actually read them.

This is the first honest number in the debate, and I want to take a few hundred words to explain why.

The first reason is procedural. The Australian Parliament has, in its better moments, understood that the legitimacy of a tax reform depends not on the speed at which it is passed but on the quality of the consultation that precedes it. The GST debate of 1999, which I am old enough to remember, ran for the better part of nine months in committee work alone. The carbon price debate ran for longer. The 2017 superannuation reforms ran for fourteen weeks of inquiry. The proposition that the present capital gains and negative gearing changes can be properly examined in two sitting days is, on the historical evidence, a procedural insult to the Senate's own committee system.

The second reason is substantive. The proposed reforms touch four interlocking elements of the existing system: the capital gains tax discount, the negative gearing rules, the treatment of family trusts, and, on the present drafting, the way each interacts with the small business CGT concessions. Each of these has a quarter-century of taxpayer behaviour built around it. The unwinding requires care. The unwinding without care produces, as Senator Sharma noted on Sky, "severe unintended consequences". Senator Sharma's specific examples were the small business owner who has structured through a family trust, the family member with an inherited rental property, and the retiree who is part-funding their retirement through a single negatively-geared asset purchased fifteen years ago.

The third reason is political, and this is where the Coalition's strategy is interesting. The Coalition, on Senator Sharma's account, is in discussions with the Greens to extend the inquiry timeline in exchange for Coalition support of a Labor bill to reduce NDIS expenditure by thirty-seven billion dollars over four years. The transaction, on its face, is mutually beneficial. Labor gets its NDIS savings. The Coalition gets its inquiry. The Greens, who have been agitating for a longer inquiry independently, get the political credit. The only loser, in the formal sense, is the government's preferred timetable, which was always too fast for the substance.

The fourth reason is the polling. One Nation, for the first time in Newspoll history, has overtaken Labor on the primary vote. The trend, on the available evidence, is being driven principally by female voters under fifty in suburban and outer-metropolitan seats. Senator Sharma, who knows something about losing centre-right women to a teal-flavoured insurgency from his own Wentworth experience, was asked on Sky why this might be. His answer was honest. The Coalition lost some goodwill and some trust at the last election. The Coalition has to rebuild it. One Nation, in his view, is a temporary occupancy by voters whose permanent political home is elsewhere. The rebuilding, in the meantime, runs through specific policy victories, of which extending the tax inquiry would be one.

The fifth reason is the broader argument about Labor's mandate. The 2025 election was fought on a series of explicit Labor commitments not to raise taxes. The Prime Minister himself, on Senator Sharma's count, made the commitment "more than fifty times" before polling day. The post-election proposal to raise the capital gains tax, curb negative gearing, and re-engineer family trusts is therefore not a policy implementation. It is a policy substitution. A government that substitutes its policies after the election, particularly on tax, owes the public an unusually long and unusually thorough inquiry into what it is now proposing. Two days is not that inquiry. Six to eight weeks is.

The deeper question Senator Sharma raised, almost in passing, is whether the Australian Premiers — three of them now, including Peter Malinauskas in South Australia, Chris Minns in NSW, and the WA Premier — who have publicly distanced themselves from the federal Labor tax package are signalling something the federal Labor caucus has not yet fully absorbed. The signal, if it is a signal, is that there is room on the centre-left for a politics of fiscal restraint that does not depend on retrospective tax substitution. The federal Coalition's task, between now and the end of the Senate inquiry, is to make the case that this politics is more naturally housed on its side of the chamber than the Premiers' side. Senator Sharma's six-to-eight-week inquiry is the procedural opening for that case.