Sir Michael Cullen forecast in 2018 that it might then be "now or never" for a capital gains tax. They’re just confusing, hard to enforce and came through successive governments who were either unable or unwilling to tax capital gains. Instead of a broad-based capital gains tax there are several decades-old tax provisions on the books which make you liable to pay income taxes on capital gains under specific circumstances. While most industrialised nations passed a capital gains tax of some sort between 1911 and 1965, we bucked the trend. “As you can tell by what we’ve just talked about a capital gains tax is really simple by comparison.”

Source: Stuff December 05, 2020 16:02 UTC