Second, our tax system needs a shake-up.

Taxes play an important role in ensuring we can provide services including healthcare and education across the country. But if we want a tax system that minimises the drag on our economy, there needs to be change – including a move towards tax on inheritance.

The Australian tax system is quite heavily reliant on taxing personal income and company earnings, with taxes on these two sources of income contributing about 62 per cent of government revenue. But because we tax wealth and assets so lightly, Australia winds up being among the lowest-taxing countries in the OECD.

So it’s worth asking: would you rather keep paying high taxes on your income, or more tax when you die? People should be able to keep a decent amount of what they’ve earned. But we need to remember that being born into a wealthy family is all luck: an inheritance is not earned by the next generation.

We shouldn’t necessarily increase taxes just because we can. However, we can shift the proportion of tax revenue we collect from income, which disproportionately impacts disadvantaged groups and young people, towards assets when people die. Yes, that means some young people – including me – might miss out on inheriting wealth further down the line, but it could reduce the current burden of income tax, for example.

With Baby Boomers, including my parents, getting older, we have a large wave of inheritance on the horizon. We’re expecting Australians over the age of 60 to transfer roughly $3.5 trillion in wealth over the next 20 years.

And we should be careful not to introduce a broad, flat tax on inheritance. That’s because inheritance often provides a bigger boost, at least as a proportion of existing wealth, for lower and middle-income children. The boost to wealth from receiving an inheritance is roughly 50 times larger for the poorest 20 per cent compared to the wealthiest 20 per cent. If we introduce an inheritance tax, it should be on inheritances above a certain threshold.

A tax on inheritance is also a relatively efficient way of raising government revenue with fewer distortions than many other taxes.

Receiving an inheritance has been shown to reduce recipients’ labour supply. That is, people tend to have less of a desire to work if they’ve been given an inheritance, especially when it’s a large sum. Introducing a tax on large inheritances, by contrast, would probably incentivise people to work more.

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But couldn’t an inheritance tax also disincentivise the giver of an inheritance from working so hard? It could affect the motivation of those strongly driven by the desire to leave wealth for their kids, but this isn’t likely to be significant. And an inheritance tax would not affect one of the biggest reasons people want to earn more: to improve their standard of living.

A tax on inheritance also needs to be accompanied by a gift tax to stop people from using the loophole of just transferring all their assets to their kids before they die, although we should exempt any charitable donations.

While my mum might joke about leaving no inheritance for me, the truth is she’s too selfless to spend everything on herself: if it didn’t end up with me or my brother, there would still be money left for charity. But the more I think about death and inequality, the more I wonder if I’m really entitled to wealth I had no part in creating. Younger me would be kicking my shins under the table, but if it meant we had an effective inheritance tax system in place, I think I could live with less inheritance.