[guzzis3]

FWIW:

I live in a "village" of about 50 heritage homes on the outskirts of Brisbane. In the last maybe 9 months about 5 of 6 houses have sold here including 3 very recently. Ours is a relatively cheap area but I cannot believe they are getting so many sales so easily. Some sold off market and the agents are pestering us for listings.

Those of you running numbers you should consider repayments as a % of income. When I was young houses cost about 3.5 times the average wage, but interest was maybe 9%. When it went to 17% house values retracted significantly. Now it's 2% prices are stupid.

Stamp duty was one of the taxes that were SUPPOSED to go with the GST. Instead as usual they kept them and payroll tax and just added another tax on us. The GST had a flawed implementation so we got stuck with almost as narrow a base as sales tax but our fearless leaders managed to turn every small business into a tax collector and teh extra administrative burden was the final straw for a lot of them. Screwed again...now we are supposed to be grateful and excited they might do what they should have done 20 years ago ?