NSW's PEXA price cut risks killing Australian tech jobs

NSW Customer Service and Digital Government Minister Jihad Dib should tell IPART to rethink its draft plan to cut PEXA's regulated Australian revenue by about 20% from FY2028. The proposal would reduce the common single-title transfer fee with financial settlement from AUD $146.30 to AUD $92.71, a 36.6% cut.

This is not serious housing policy. It is a badly lopsided intervention that risks engineering jobs, cybersecurity investment and a world-leading digital platform to deliver buyers a saving barely visible in the cost of purchasing a home.

False economy

PEXA handles about 99% of Australia's electronic conveyancing market. A compulsory infrastructure platform with that reach needs oversight. But regulation should protect customers from monopoly abuse, not strip a technology business of the capacity to maintain the system everyone has been required to use.

The proposed saving on a typical transfer is AUD $53.59. In a property purchase involving legal bills, searches, finance costs, moving expenses and stamp duty, that amount is political confetti. It will not build a home, improve planning, train a tradie or help a first-home buyer assemble a deposit. Calling it a housing-affordability measure would insult anyone locked out of the market.

"Saving AUD $50 on electronic conveyancing is not going to contribute to housing affordability in any way, shape or form," said Russell Cohen, CEO, PEXA.

IPART's draft says regulated revenue needs to fall by about 20%, while common transfer fees would drop by between 14.6% and 36.6%. That is the bureaucratic seduction of a visible price cut: a household sees tens of dollars once, while the company absorbs a recurring shock measured in tens of millions. The voter gets a rounding error. The technology workforce carries the risk.

Tech jobs

PEXA is not a passive tollbooth bolted to a land-title database. It combines software, payments, identity, integrations, digital signing, reliability engineering and cyber defence. Failure can disrupt the transfer of somebody's largest asset.

The draft report recognises shared infrastructure costs across settlement, digital signing and cybersecurity. It records more than 6.5 million attempted intrusions in 2024–25 and notes that PEXA falls under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act. Cutting the income available to defend critical infrastructure while governments warn that cyber threats are accelerating is policy incoherence.

"Those are the kinds of investments that we'll have to pick and choose, because we're going to have to constrain our labour because we don't get a return on it. So it's the wrong policy setting," said Cohen.

Projects, contractors, graduate intakes and the next engineering hire are often the first costs put under pressure after a regulatory shock. Australia constantly complains that it cannot retain technical talent, commercialise research or build globally significant software companies. NSW has found one and is considering a pricing decision that treats its people as an expendable input.

Broken model

IPART is forcing a digital platform into a building-block regulatory method inherited from physical infrastructure. Its report acknowledges that these models were developed for capital-intensive networks, while more software-platform spending is treated as operating expenditure. It also concedes there is no settled Australian regulatory precedent for establishing an asset base for a digital platform of this kind.

That should prompt caution, not confidence. Software is not a water pipe. Its productive asset is continually rebuilt through code, people, process knowledge, security work and connections to banks, conveyancers, registries and revenue offices. A model focused on recoverable historical expenditure can miss the future cost of keeping a national platform secure, resilient and current.

PEXA's dominance is not a blank cheque. The company should be challenged on efficiency, service and competition. But a regulator should not manufacture a return profile that makes investment irrational, then act surprised when innovation slows or jobs disappear.

The better interim option is the CPI-linked cap while NSW, other jurisdictions and the Commonwealth develop a regime grounded in software economics rather than utility-era reflexes.

Policy clash

The NSW Digital Strategy says government should use technology to support the local economy, lift productivity and underpin reliable digital infrastructure. Dib cannot credibly promote those goals while allowing a regulator to punish an Australian technology employer for successfully building that infrastructure.

The minister should require the final process to test employment, cybersecurity, sovereign capability and future investment as seriously as the headline transaction price. He should demand transparent modelling of which programs, roles and security upgrades can disappear without weakening the service. If IPART cannot show that, the government should reject the cut and preserve CPI-based pricing until a defensible framework exists.

This is not an argument that every incumbent deserves protection. Governments must stop announcing technology ambitions with one hand while removing the commercial basis for technology investment with the other. A country does not create an IT industry by subsidising hypothetical jobs while regulating real jobs out of existence.

"More than half our workforce in Australia are technologists: engineers, product people, data scientists, software developers, testers, a whole cybersecurity fleet of people, and in the UK as well. We're a tech company," added Cohen.