First home buyers and the construction industry will be the big winners under a targeted boost, which will eliminate stamp duty on newly-built homes below $800,000 and slash thousands of dollars for properties up to $1 million. Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the change to stamp duty thresholds would also support new home construction and create jobs as part of the government’s COVID-19 Recovery Plan. “Thousands of people will see their bank balances benefit from this change – it will help get more keys into more front doors of more new homes,” Ms Berejiklian said. “It will also boost housing construction across NSW and support jobs in the building industry at a time when we need them more t
The New South Wales government will spend $83 million on a long-awaited reform of state’s planning process, cutting the time and paperwork required for developments. The NSW Planning Reform Action Plan aims to drop the time it takes to make decisions on rezoning from an average of 630 days to 439 days; for larger and regionally significant projects from 364 to 273 days and for state significant projects from 118 to 98 days. The government has also recently invested almost $10 million to enhance its ePlanning platform and ensure all councils can get online to process development applications in half the time, with greater transparency. The announcement has already received positive feedback f
A new call centre at Springfield Central will provide up to 700 jobs in Ipswich. The call centre is being set up by Stella Asia Pacific, which provides call centre services for the Australian Tax Office. They have taken up offices at the GE Building at Springfield Central and have started the search for call centre operators. Ipswich Mayor Teresa Harding said these jobs provide new opportunities for job seekers and will help Ipswich bounce back from COVID-19. “While our community has been challenged by this pandemic, a boost of 700 local jobs will provide a significant benefit to our economy with great on-flow affects. “Ipswich is a highly desirable place to live and by attracting new busine
First-home buyers are "vacuuming up" available titled land, even blocks that have been sitting on the market for more than two years, in a rush to get the HomeBuilder grant, agents and developers say. Inquiries have tripled and land sales have gone up by more than 300 per cent since the HomeBuilder scheme was announced on June 4, said Kelly Donaldson, director of First National Margaret River, WA. "Titled blocks of land around the $160,000 mark have been vacuumed up in the last five weeks," he said. The HomeBuilder scheme has triggered a run on land estates across the country. Pat Scala "There was a huge run on land estates that qualify for the grant." First-home buyers in WA get a tot
Replacing stamp duty with a broad-based land tax is at the top of the New South Wales government’s list of recommendations for a new tax mix for Australians. Changing taxes could encourage people to sell their homes, developers to build houses and make the state budget more manageable, according to the draft report on the NSW government’s review of federal financial relations. The review lists 15 suggestions for the country’s taxes including the land tax switch, abolition of stamp duties and GST reform. In 2018-19 the NSW government raised around $7 billion, or 24 per cent, of annual tax revenue from transfer duty, making it the state’s second-largest source of tax revenue. According to the
