Scrap Stamp Duty. Then Start Fixing the Rest.

Stamp duty is one of the most indefensible taxes in Australia. And yet, in Western Australia, it continues to be treated as untouchable.

The Cook Labor Government insists it is helping first-home buyers. The Opposition talks about tweaking thresholds and concessions. Everyone agrees housing is broken. But almost no one is willing to say the obvious out loud:

Stamp duty itself is the problem. It does not need reform. It needs abolition.

Stamp duty is a blunt, distortionary tax imposed at the worst possible moment; when people are trying to buy, sell, or move homes. It punishes mobility. It locks families into houses that no longer suit their needs. It inflates prices. And it extracts tens of thousands of dollars upfront, regardless of a buyer’s income, cash flow, or circumstances.

That alone should be enough to kill it.

But the real scandal is how long we have known all of this, and how comfortable governments have become with pretending otherwise.

For years, the solution has been framed as administrative fine-tuning. Lift the threshold. Expand the concession. Peg it to the median price. These measures are sold as meaningful reform, but they are not. They are band-aids on a tax that should not exist at all.

Whenever a discussion on stamp duty "reform" comes up, I always think of the saying: "You can put a tuxedo on a goat. But it's still a goat."

A first-home buyer today can still be handing over $30,000 or more in duty before they have bought a single piece of furniture or paid their first mortgage instalment. That is not assistance. It is a barrier.

Defenders of stamp duty argue that scrapping it would push prices higher. But this claim collapses under scrutiny. Stamp duty already pushes prices up by being baked into transaction costs. Sellers factor it in. Buyers stretch to cover it. The tax inflates the market while simultaneously restricting movement within it. If anything, greater liquidity in the market would put downward pressure on prices.

Which brings me to, perhaps, the worst part of stamp duty: it actively discourages downsizing. As our population continues to age, older homeowners sit in large family homes they no longer need, not because they want to, but because the cost of moving is punitive. That keeps larger homes off the market, tightens supply, and drives prices higher for younger families. The tax doesn’t just hurt buyers. It gums up the entire system.

And then there is the quiet absurdity of how stamp duty is collected.

Private settlement agents now do much of the work governments once did themselves. They hold the funds. They process the payments. They carry the compliance burden. Governments collect record revenue while outsourcing administrative tasks — and paying less to do so. That is not efficiency. It is bureaucratic opportunism.

All of this might still be tolerated if stamp duty were part of a coherent, disciplined tax system. But it is not. It sits alongside a growing collection of outdated, overlapping, and often irrational taxes that remain in place long after their original justification has vanished.

Take the luxury car tax. It was introduced to protect Australian car manufacturing — an industry that no longer exists. Yet the tax remains. Why? Because governments have become addicted to revenue streams that require little political courage to maintain.

The same applies to a maze of taxes and duties on transactions, insurance, payroll, fuel, alcohol, and more — layered on top of income tax and GST, each with its own bureaucracy, compliance costs, and economic distortions. And that's not even mentioning payroll tax, a disincentive for employers to create jobs.

Australians are not just overtaxed. They are over-processed and over-regulated. And, most concerning, more and more people seem to be ok with that, failing to challenge the government's logic on "well, we've always taxed it, so that makes it ok".

This is the deeper issue that stamp duty exposes. Governments have lost the discipline to retire bad taxes (or taxes that once served a function at a point in time but no longer do). Instead, they add, tweak, and patch — growing the system more complex, less transparent, and harder to justify with every passing year.

The introduction of the GST was meant to simplify the tax base. It was sold as a replacement for inefficient state taxes, including stamp duties. Instead, states kept the old taxes and pocketed the windfall. What was meant to be reform became accumulation. On that fact alone, stamp duty must be abolished.

Now, when the cost of living bites, governments plead caution. They warn against bold moves. They urge patience. But this restraint is selective. It never seems to apply when revenue is rising or spending expands. It only appears when voters ask for structural relief.

Scrapping stamp duty would be a genuine act of reform, albeit 26 years overdue. Not a press release. Not a threshold adjustment. A clean break.

Yes, it would force governments to confront how they fund services. That is the point. A tax system that relies on inefficient, unfair levies to prop up spending habits is not sustainable. It is evasive and nothing short of government-sanctioned theft.

If governments are serious about housing affordability, productivity, and fairness, stamp duty must go. And once it does, the same hard questions should be asked of every other tax that exists only because it is politically easier to keep than to defend.

This is not about helping one cohort at the expense of another. It is about restoring logic to a system that has drifted far from it.

Stamp duty is the obvious place to start.
But it should not be the last.