Coverage of Michael Wu’s paper, Robert Carling on CGT, Peter Tulip on heritage laws

Getting a handle on the money hosed at the energy transition is all but impossible, but Michael Wu of the Centre for Independent Studies has done the yeoman’s work in trying to track it down.

In a 2024 paper he estimates that federal subsidies to renewables across an acronym soup of programs have totalled about $29bn in the past decade, or roughly $2.6bn a year on average, and notes this is a conservative figure that leaves out big-ticket items such as Snowy 2.0, state schemes and the Capacity Investment Scheme.

The Centre for independent Studies’ Robert Carling, after stating in a submission to the CGT inquiry this week that negative gearing had become a “whipping boy” for housing affordability ­debates, said the change would not substantially affect housing affordability and was unlikely to raise significant government revenue. “All the evidence is that it would reduce house prices ­slightly and increase rents slightly because there would definitely be fewer rental properties available in the future,” he said.

“But as investors buy less investment properties, owner-occupiers will buy more. And the reduction in prices would be quite small.”