Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week we saw an inflation figure with a four in front of it. It was four per cent in Australia. Part of that is due to excessive government spending—expansionary state and federal government budgets—as the Reserve Bank has pointed out, but part of it is also due to a lack of competition in key sectors. I want to talk about one sector in particular today, the e-conveyancing market. The e-conveyancing market allows the digital settlement of property transactions, which is overwhelmingly done in Australia. About 75 per cent of property transactions, about four million transactions, were effected in this way last year. There's effectively a monopoly provider of these services, Property Exchange Australia, PEXA, which controls 99 per cent of the e-conveyancing market. Unsurprisingly, when you have a monopoly, you have monopolistic behaviour. There's a lack of competition, and higher prices result.

The New South Wales Productivity Commission have just looked into this issue and they reported yesterday. Looking at this market, they said that the market is not effectively competitive, that there are high levels of market concentration, that high profits go to the provider and that there are material barriers to entry. In fact, Dr Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury in the other chamber, has said that PEXA's behaviour has been that of a textbook monopolist.

What are we going to do about it? The New South Wales Productivity Commission found that the existing regulator, the Australian Registrars National Electronic Conveyancing Council, ARNECC, which most people wouldn't have heard of, is simply not up to the task of policing that market. They've said that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the ACCC, a federal body, is best placed to lead the ongoing market reforms in this area.

State and federal governments committed to opening this sector up to competition by next year, but at the moment that is woefully behind schedule. I urge this government and, in particular, Andrew Leigh, the assistant minister for competition, to get involved.