If your family or your business has held an asset since before 20 September 1985, this is the change that affects you most, and it has received almost none of the attention it deserves.
The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Act 2026 removes the pre-CGT status of assets acquired before 20 September 1985 after 30 June 2027.
What pre-CGT status has meant
Capital gains tax was introduced on 20 September 1985 and applied only to assets acquired on or after that date. Assets held before it were carved out entirely. A gain on a pre-CGT asset has simply not been a capital gain.
That has been true for forty years, which means a great many people holding these assets have never had to think about capital gains tax on them at all. Farmland held by a family since the 1970s. Business premises bought in 1982. Shares acquired in the early eighties and never sold. A holiday house that has been in the family for two generations.
For all of these, the capital gain has been zero regardless of how much the asset appreciated. That is about to change.
What is not yet clear
The Act removes the status. The detail of how the transition works, including the cost base that applies going forward and how it is determined, matters enormously and is the part to watch. A great deal in this package has been left to legislative instruments and further guidance, and the Tax Institute's submission on the Bill specifically flagged the absence of core design elements including valuation and apportionment rules.
Until that detail is settled, the responsible position is that you should know which of your assets are affected and roughly what they are worth, and hold off on decisions until the mechanics are clear.
Who should be paying attention
Anyone holding land, premises, shares or other significant assets acquired before 20 September 1985, whether personally, through a trust, or through a company.
Also anyone in a family group where an older generation holds such assets, because this interacts with succession planning in ways that are not obvious. An asset that was going to pass with a particular tax outcome may now pass with a different one.
What is worth doing now
Identify the assets. This sounds trivial and it is often not, because forty year old acquisition records are frequently missing and the evidence that an asset is pre-CGT can be surprisingly hard to produce.
Find the documentation while you can. Contracts, settlement statements, title records, share registries. If the evidence is thin, that is worth knowing now rather than at the point of a transaction.
Get a sense of current value. Not a formal valuation necessarily, but a realistic number, because the size of the exposure determines how much attention this deserves.
And be careful of anyone urging a transaction before 30 June 2027 without having seen the transitional rules. Disposing of an asset to crystallise a pre-CGT position is itself a decision with consequences, including duty, and the rules governing what happens on 1 July 2027 are not yet fully drawn.