In an opinion piece this week, Amy Auster wrote that “stamp duty is the most wretched of all taxes”. Auster called for a range of professionals to support the NSW government’s property tax reform proposals, asserting that commentators who are critical of the proposals “are wrong because they have failed to grasp the detail, and in doing so are failing the Australian public”.

With unfeigned respect, having worked through the details of the proposal, I consider it potentially more wretched than the tax it seeks to replace. There are many reasons for this and I have set out four below.