In my opinion Stamp Duty has helped hedged us against the housing bubble created by our negative gearing and captital gains tax regimes. When investors strongly outweight first home buyers in the market making it easy to turn over ownership of residential housing would be disastrous.

There are many real-estate websites in the US spruiking the fact they have lower turnover taxes than Europe but look at the result.

We shouldn't be playing with Stamp Duty without modifying CGT and negative gearing.

grputland,

Smart move! it is like not paying GST by not buying anything.

The builders won't get paid until transfer takes place.

So for those who hate negative gearing, why do you hate it so much and do you really think we can afford to take it away.

NG allows for the property investor to write off the repairs and maintinance and fees on their propery and the interest on their loan loan. That's it!

So, take a $400K loan at say 8%, that's $32,000, add say $1500 fees and maint, that's a loss of $33,500.

Deduct the income of say $24,000 the write of is $9,500 wich become a tax deduction.

Now, take away this tax deduction, which means the investor has to pay this short fall with after tax dollars and whamo, you have no investors and no rentals.

Now assuming this was to happen and it did relieve presure on home values, it would also remove the need for a first home buyers grant, so who then could afford to buy a house.

Not many more as they would no longer have the deposit from the grant.

It's not rocket science, many people can't afford homes because they spend their money elsewhere.

I'm not sure if I agree with the creative accounting around negative gearing. It should not be allowed to offset tax paid for other income. It should only go against loan interest and capital gains for a specific property.

At the moment we encourage investing at a loss as a way of avoiding PAYE income tax don't we? If so, IT's A SCAM.

To claim negative gearing on a future investment, you should have to build a new dwelling, thus adding to the supply of rental housing. And the grandfathering of past investments should apply only if you have a tenant in place. Merely claiming that the property is available for rent should not be sufficient, because it lets you demand too much rent and/or discriminate against particular classes of tenants.

Investors who buy existing dwellings keep them out of the hands of first-time buyers and therefore keep those prospective buyers in the rental market to push up rents.

Under appropriate rules, negative gearing COULD be an incentive to supply rental housing. Under present rules, it is simply a tax break for the rich at the expense of the poor.