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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4112 ..

Having to save an extra $7,000 or more to cover stamp duty puts home ownership out of the reach of many. Well-targeted stamp duty concessions give lower income buyers a chance to compete against cashed-up property investors. I personally know many people in the situation of trying to meet their ongoing demands of current costs of living while trying to save to buy their own house, and they are finding it very difficult.

I am even almost considering declaring a conflict of interest in relation to this motion: how do I manage the ongoing rent payments that I have to face and my ongoing HECS repayments, plus trying to save up enough money to actually be able to afford to buy something in the Canberra property market when prices have increased so much over the last few years?

Many different things can impact on housing affordability and first home buyers, but I want to focus on the stamp duty concession scheme. I begun lobbying for reform of the stamp duty concession scheme almost two years ago, because of the problems that I could see with the scheme and through the problems that many people are letting me know about. As the government has boasted today, the concession scheme has been substantially reformed. But it is still well short of perfect.

Under the current scheme, a couple with two full-time incomes could get the full stamp duty exemption on the purchase of a two-bedroom inner city apartment, while a low-income family with three kids could end up not getting any exemption on a four-bedroom house in west Belconnen. The current schemes still have problems and could even be seen as anti-family. So I will take the opportunity today to put forward my views on the elements of a better system.

By the time the Stanhope government took office, house prices had already risen so far that only a handful of people could access the stamp duty concession, and I suspect that most of them were actually buying properties at below market value. The concession scheme obviously was not achieving its aim at making home ownership affordable for people on limited incomes. The scheme was essentially flawed because the eligibility criteria did not adjust in line with house prices for income. The scheme set a fixed property value threshold while the cost of housing was spiralling upward at rates of 20 per cent or more a year. The scheme also set a fixed income limit that was too low to service an ordinary loan of 90 per cent of the value of a property.

The first response to these calls from the government was a long time coming and in the end proved to be utterly inadequate. In the year after the first revision the number of home buyers getting concessions actually fell. In 2002-03, 41 buyers received concessions but in the first six months after the scheme was revised only 14 buyers were able to get concessions. Ninety-three per cent of the properties receiving a stamp duty concession under that scheme were unit title properties and only three buyers receiving concession had children. So I continued to loudly criticise the scheme, and the government finally had a second go at reforming it.

The new scheme in operation now is one I will recognise as definitely a step forward and supports many people without children to buy a place of their own. But I think that we need to realise that families need help too. We do not know if any families are benefiting from the new scheme because, although the new income test relates specifically to the

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