Tuesday, 18 June 2024

Electronic land transfers

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (22:17): (964) My adjournment is directed towards the Minister for Planning, and the action I seek is to explain the lack of reform in regard to e-conveyancing, which concerns the digital transfer of property titles. Across Australia 99 per cent of the e-conveyancing market is held by PEXA, or Property Exchange Australia. This $300 million industry last year settled more than $900 billion in property over 4 million transactions across Australia, including hundreds of thousands of households in Victoria. Extraordinarily, Victorians, both individuals and businesses, have no choice but to use this monopoly. We are in a housing crisis, we are in a cost-of-living crisis, but every time Victorians buy or sell a property, PEXA takes a clip. No-one doubts PEXA provides a valuable service, but we also know the best way to minimise cost is to enable choice and to create more innovation and allow more competition. In some ways it is unsurprising, the lack of competition for PEXA, since it was born out of the privatisation of an e-conveyancing system created by state governments and the banks. But when privatisation of such occurs we must ensure that there will be effective competition in place to ensure consumers and businesses can get a good deal.

Thankfully, across Australia governments have been pushing for more competition in the sector. For example, New South Wales and Queensland have already committed to mandating competition by December 2025, and I say ‘mandate’ because currently there is a lack of interoperability between the systems. It is a bit like if only Telstra existed and you signed up to Optus, you could not call anyone on Telstra. I do not think many people would take up that offer. However, just like it is now possible to phone a Telstra number from an Optus service, it should also be possible to use competing e-conveyancing systems together. Unfortunately, we see absent from this list for reform the Victorian government. We do not hear much about e-conveyancing competition from this government. I am told Minister Kilkenny attends the relevant working groups, yet Victoria has not made any announcement, and we know from recent reporting PEXA is dragging its feet on reform. And who happen to be some of the major investors in PEXA – that would be the industry super funds.

We know under Labor the prices of everything just keep going up. This tired, old Labor government is out of ideas. I seek the action of the minister to explain why she is not more vocal about improving competition in this sector and to explain why they are dragging their feet on important reform that will save young families money when they are buying a home.