RBA Governor Michele Bullock says stamp duty is preventing people from downsizing and moving for jobs

One of Australia’s most powerful figures has revealed the biggest hurdle standing in the way of fixing the country’s housing crisis.

The most powerful figure in Australian finance has condemned stamp duty on property sales as a “barrier for dynamism in the economy” that stops large homes from being freed up for families and prevents people from moving to take up new jobs and fill skill shortages.

Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock also warned quantum computing would soon enable fraudsters to steal our money by breaking existing payments system protections, meaning industry “really needs to get going on” encryption upgrades.

On Friday Ms Bullock delivered The Daily Telegraph’s Future Sydney Bradfield Oration, named after the father of the Harbour Bridge, engineer John Bradfield.

After her speech at the Opera House, the Governor engaged in a wide-ranging Q&A in which she addressed issues including housing supply.

The question to her on that topic called for her personal opinion, not the RBA’s view. And it was specifically about Sydney where the supply shortage is most acute. But her response was a message relevant to cities and governments across Australia.

Michele Bullock delivering the 2025 Daily Telegraph Future Sydney Bradfield oration. Picture: Richard Dobson

After prefacing her comments by saying the RBA was not responsible for housing and house prices, Ms Bullock asked: “Are there policies, taxes, things we do, that are discouraging people perhaps from downsizing from large homes.”

Economic research institute e61 last year found stamp duty was deterring nearly a quarter of potential downsizings.

Ms Bullock continued: “It’s not only a barrier to downsizing. It’s a barrier to people moving to find jobs. So, it’s also a barrier for dynamism in the economy because it basically keeps people pretty much where they are instead of allowing them to up and move.”

The former NSW Coalition government led by Dominic Perrottet began a move away from large one-off stamp duty payments to smaller annual land taxes, which economists say are less of an impediment to people buying and selling houses when it would suit them to.

The current NSW Labor government abolished the changes after it took office in 2023 and expanded exemptions instead.

Some states – most notably Victoria – do have stamp duty exemptions and discounts for older Australians.

Ms Bullock also emphasised the importance of having enough labour to build homes.

“So we do need to find a way to encourage … people to come in with these skills,” she said, plus incentivise school leavers to do a trade.

Earlier in her address Ms Bullock flagged an emerging threat from quantum computing “which is expected to result in current encryption standards for payments being broken sometime in the future.

“This requires migrating card payments to the advanced encryption standard which is a quantum-safe solution.”

Then, departing from the version of her speech published on the RBA website, she added: “So that’s another big project that really needs to get moving.”

In the Q&A that followed, Ms Bullock said: “If you believe what they say on the tin of quantum computing, what takes 200 years to decrypt now … will take a matter of minutes. So it is a big threat.”

“At the moment we trust our financial institutions to keep our data safe and they do that through encryption,” she said. “We need to make sure we keep up with that quantum computing situation because otherwise it’s not safe.”

Ms Bullock also shared her views during a Q&A. Picture: Richard Dobson

She added that she thought financial institutions understood the risk and were onto it.

Asked whether she or someone close to her had been caught by a scam she replied: “I personally haven’t been but I’m not so silly as to think I couldn’t be. They are getting better and better.

“My husband got a message the other day that looked like it was from NAB, but I scrolled back and it looked like it was from NAB, but it wasn’t,” Ms Bullock said. “It was a spoof. So we went to the website, we checked it out, and we figured it was a spoof. So you’ve got to be very, very careful.

“It also demonstrates that it’s not just up to the financial institutions.”

Telcos and social media platforms had to be ready and willing to take down spoof and scams, Ms Bullock said.

Originally published as RBA Governor Michele Bullock says stamp duty is preventing people from downsizing and moving for jobs