While economic conditions, fiscal settings, and policy debates have shifted significantly over the past fifteen years, public expectations of Australia’s tax system have remained broadly consistent. Australians continue to expect a system that is fair, progressive, and capable of addressing inequality, while also funding high‑quality public services that support everyday life. The 2025 Per Capita Tax Survey confirms the resilience of these expectations, even as economic pressures and policy complexity have intensified.
Respondents express clear support for increased government spending, particularly on health and aged care services, reflecting their centrality to social wellbeing and prosperity. The majority of respondents said they would personally pay more tax for better health and aged care services. However, in other areas of government services, support for higher spending is tempered by more ambivalent views about personal tax contributions. While Australians broadly endorse higher spending in principle, willingness to personally pay higher taxes to fund these services is mixed, highlighting a persistent tension between collective expectations and individual financial pressures.
Preferences around revenue raising remain highly consistent with previous years. The most popular options continue to be cracking down on corporate tax avoidance, increasing taxes on high‑income earners, introducing or expanding inheritance and wealth taxes, and reforming capital gains tax and negative gearing concessions. These findings reinforce a long‑standing public belief that those with greater capacity to pay; particularly large corporations and high‑income individuals; should shoulder a greater share of the tax burden.
What has changed over time is not what Australians want from the tax system, but how confidently and cohesively those preferences are expressed. The 2025 results reflect a modest but meaningful recalibration shaped by cost‑of‑living pressures, particularly housing affordability and essential goods. Support for reform remains, but it is expressed with greater caution and conditionality.
Key findings from the 2025 Survey include:
- Persistent support for fairness and progressivity: A strong majority continue to support minimum tax rates for high‑income earners and stronger action on corporate tax avoidance, with results remaining within long‑term historical ranges.
- High regard for public services: Australians rate public services positively across quality, access, value for money, and usefulness, reinforcing expectations of an active and capable public sector.
- Willingness to pay: Support for higher spending on health and aged care remains strong, but personal willingness to pay higher taxes for other government services is more restrained than in earlier years.
- Targeted concern about inequality: Housing and income inequality continue to attract the highest levels of concern and willingness to contribute, while support declines for more abstract or less immediate forms of inequality.
- Fragmented reform preferences: While reform is widely supported, consensus on specific policy pathways—such as negative gearing reform or decarbonisation measures—is weaker and more dispersed.
- Cautious openness to new instruments: Policies such as windfall taxes attract majority support but are accompanied by large neutral segments, indicating openness without firm consolidation.
Three dynamics define the current position. First, enduring principles remain firmly embedded. Across all major questions, Australians consistently prioritise fairness, redistribution, and the role of government in shaping economic outcomes. Second, the intensity of support has softened at the margins. Compared with the years immediately following the pandemic, Australians are less emphatic in their support for redistributive measures, reflecting tighter household budgets and heightened awareness of economic trade‑offs rather than a rejection of core values. Third, policy preferences have become more fragmented. Agreement on the need for reform remains strong, but there is less consensus on how reform should be implemented.
A further theme emerging from the 2025 results is the growing importance of perception and understanding. Long‑standing beliefs, such as the perception that Australia is a high‑tax country, remain influential but are now less uniformly held. This fragmentation complicates policy communication, requiring reform proposals to engage with a broader and more diverse set of assumptions.
Across the survey, a consistent pattern emerges. Australians support increased public spending, particularly in health and aged care services, believe large corporations and high‑income earners do not contribute sufficiently, and recognise economic inequality; especially housing and income inequality, as a central challenge. At the same time, they remain cautious about increasing their own tax burden and selective about which inequalities they are willing to fund through higher taxation.
This combination of stability and nuance defines the current policy environment. While the case for reform remains strong at the level of principle, it is weaker and more contested at the level of specific policy design, with support becoming more diffuse, conditional, and sensitive to framing. The Tax Survey shows that Australians are not resistant to change; they support reform when it aligns with shared expectations of fairness and delivers clear outcomes. In 2026, the challenge is therefore not to shift public values, but to translate them into credible policy designs suited to a more fragmented and economically constrained environment, reflecting a more mature and conditional mandate for reform that demands closer alignment between principle and practice.