Page 3685 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 13 September 2017
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going to be cutting back on those supports, and that is why taxation reform is important, because it shares the burden more equitably.
The alternative arrangement would be just to continue along the journey of ever-increasing stamp duty and ever more unaffordable housing for Canberrans. If we had not undertaken stamp duty reform, we would have seen stamp duty increase considerably. The national average growth in stamp duty revenue has been 15.3 per cent a year. In New South Wales it grew by 22.1 per cent a year. In the ACT it has grown by only 4.6 per cent and that has been entirely driven by the commercial property sector where revenue has increased significantly as we have sought more international investment into Canberra’s commercial property market.
Residential stamp duty revenue has, in fact, declined by 0.6 per cent over the same period. Across the border in New South Wales stamp duty has been rising by 22.1 per cent a year and residential stamp duty in the ACT has been falling, both in terms of the rate applied to each house that is sold and in the global amount collected by the territory government.
Mr Coe made some other comments in his speech about people leaving the ACT as a result of taxation reform. The statistics as issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics do not back up that assertion because the ACT was the fastest-growing state or territory in the past five years from when tax reform began. Our population increased from 357,222 to 406,403 people in that period of the first five years of tax reform, an 11.2 per cent increase, the largest increase of any state or territory.
I can also report that, because stamp duty has been coming down, people have not had to borrow their stamp duty and put that onto their mortgage and that mortgage repayments in the ACT have dropped in the period 2011 to 2016. In 2011 the average mortgage repayments in the ACT were $2,167. Now they are $2,058, and one of the contributing factors has been that stamp duty has been less and people have not had to borrow it and have not had to pay interest on their stamp duty payments as part of their mortgage. And that is an important reform.
I know it is particularly pertinent in the Dunne household, as she has a number of children who, I am sure, will be wanting to get into the housing market and stamp duty is a real barrier to people entering the housing market. If they are looking over the border at New South Wales then they will be paying a lot more stamp duty than they do in the ACT.
It is interesting also to observe what has happened in terms of the total number of dwellings in the territory. We have seen a 15 per cent increase in the number of residential dwellings in the ACT in the past five years. The growth in the number of dwellings has outstripped the population growth increase. We have gone from 137,792 dwellings in 2011-12 to 158,195 dwellings in 2017-18, a growth rate of around 15 per cent. That is very significant over that time period.
The assertion was made by the Leader of the Opposition that there are fewer rental properties. Again, the facts do not bear out that particular statement. And what we have seen is that rental properties have increased as a share of the total amount of
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