Thank you for your service, now here’s your tax bill

Friendly fire: redeployed defence staffers could fall foul of capital gains tax rules. (Image: NZDF)

Mon, 21 Mar 2022

New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel posted overseas could become collateral damage under the government’s reworked brightline housing tax.Brightline, a capital gains tax on property sales originally brought in by the National government in 2015, was extended from homes owned for five years to 10 years by the Labour government last March. The aim is to discourage speculative house ‘flipping’. There have been some modifications to the rules, including halving the time frame to five years for new builds, but issu...

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