On the morning of 14 May 2026, the day after the Federal Budget, we ran a full-page advertisement in The Australian Financial Review.

This is the thinking behind why we ran it, and what we hope it achieves.

The 2026–27 Federal Budget contained the most significant changes to Australia's capital gains tax regime since 1999. From 1 July 2027, the 50% CGT discount that has applied to assets held for more than twelve months will be replaced by a return to inflation indexation. A new 30% minimum tax rate on real capital gains will apply. Negative gearing will be restricted to newly built residential properties.

These changes have been extensively covered. They affect millions of Australians who hold investment property, shares, or other assets outside superannuation. For most of these people, the changes are gradual: transitional rules preserve the existing 50% discount on gains accrued before 1 July 2027, so the impact builds slowly over the years that follow.

There is one cohort, however, for whom the change is not gradual. It is a cliff.

When capital gains tax was first introduced in Australia in September 1985 by the Hawke government, it was prospective. Assets acquired before 20 September 1985 were grandfathered - they sat entirely outside the CGT system. For forty years since, Australians who owned pre-CGT assets have held them on the understanding that any eventual gain from their sale would be tax-free.

This grandfathering ends on 1 July 2027. From that date, gains accrued on pre-1985 assets enter the CGT system for the first time. The forty years of value already built remain exempt - but every dollar of growth from 1 July 2027 forward will be taxed at marginal rates, with a 30% minimum floor.

This is the most material change in the tax position of Australia's longest-held private assets in four decades.

Many of the businesses caught by this change are owned by founders who started them in the 1960s, 1970s, or early 1980s. These founders are now typically in their seventies or eighties. They built durable, often family-led businesses through deregulation, multiple recessions, the floating of the dollar, the GST, the GFC, and Covid. For many, the prospect of a tax-free sale of the business they built has been an assumption - usually unstated, often barely noticed - that has shaped their thinking about succession for their entire adult lives.

That assumption no longer holds.

If you are a founder whose business pre-dates 1985, the AFR ad explains directly how to reach us. Phone or email Jason. The conversation costs nothing and goes no further than us unless you want it to.

If you are an adviser to such a founder - an accountant, lawyer, broker, banker, or family office - we would value the introduction. Our intermediary terms are standard and we make the process easy: a single decision-maker, no committee theatre, a clear yes or no within days.

The window is fourteen months. The conversation costs nothing. Waiting does.