Joseph Daoud, the founder of mortgage broker It’s Simple Finance, bought $17,500 worth of digital billboards inside and outside Canberra Airport and switched them on after midnight on Sunday morning to display the message: "Stop the ambition tax."
Eighteen conspicuous billboards carrying that message went live on Sunday 24 May and will remain up until the end of the Federal Parliamentary sitting week, a placement timed as politicians and their staff flew into Canberra on Monday for the sitting week and budget estimates.
Daoud’s purchase is part of a wider national advocacy push. Australian mortgage brokerage It’ launched the #StopTheAmbitionTax campaign in response to proposed Federal Government changes to Capital Gains Tax, and the Canberra digital out-of-home takeover was built to land precisely where decision-makers would first see it as they arrived in the capital.
"Stop the ambition tax," Daoud said in a short statement accompanying the placements, and the campaign’s visible scale is designed to make that slogan unavoidable for lawmakers over the coming days.
The government’s proposal — scheduled to take effect from 1 July 2027 — would replace the current 50 per cent Capital Gains Tax discount for individuals, trusts and partnerships with cost base indexation and a 30 per cent minimum tax rate on capital gains. That change to the CGT framework is the specific policy the campaign targets, and organisers say the people most affected will be small business owners, side hustlers and young investors.
Patrick Blacker, who worked on the campaign creative, framed the effort as deliberately focused. "We always love working with someone who has the ambition and passion that Joey has for helping others," Blacker said. "After being briefed earlier this week, we asked ourselves one question: how do we create real impact? That’s why we built a campaign around the very people these proposed Capital Gains Tax changes will affect, the small business owners, the side hustlers and the young investors of our country."
Blacker added that the visual work would extend beyond the airport placements. "We’re putting their faces and their stories front and centre, exactly where the conversation is happening," he said, signalling that selected social media stories may also appear across the Canberra DOOH network as the campaign runs through the sitting week.
The timing is the story’s pressure point. Daoud told reporters, "This isn’t about politics, it’s about fairness," even as the campaign’s arrival was explicitly arranged to coincide with lawmakers coming to Canberra for official business. That contrast — a claim of nonpartisanship delivered where and when politicians gather to debate policy — is the friction the campaign relies on to drive attention.
The scale is modest but specific: $17,500 and 18 billboards concentrated at and near the airport, flipped on after midnight on Sunday and left in place through the parliamentary week. Organisers have framed those numbers as a way to amplify individuals who stand to lose under the proposed CGT changes, saying the campaign gives them a platform "in a place the decision-makers can’t look away from."
What happens next is simple and consequential: the DOOH placements will run through the Federal Parliamentary sitting week and the national debate over the CGT changes continues with a new, visible voice in Canberra’s arrival corridors. From 1 July 2027 the government plans to move to cost base indexation and a 30 per cent minimum tax rate on capital gains, making the coming months a period of lobbying, campaigning and public conversation that the airport billboards were designed to shape.
Daoud said the people he expects to speak through the campaign are not ideological opponents but everyday builders of wealth. "The Australians who will wear these changes are the ones doing everything right: working hard, taking a risk, putting money aside to build something for their family. Punishing ambition sends exactly the wrong message. We wanted to give those people a platform to be heard, in a place the decision-makers can’t look away from."
