It can't do it faster because that would mean double taxing someone who paid full stamp duty before the change and then was hit by higher land tax afterwards.

An alternative would be to eliminate stamp duty immediately and to apply the land tax only to those properties that were bought stamp duty free. Eventually, after most properties changed hands, the land tax would be near universal.

But the main reason none of the states have done it is the short-term hit to revenue. Stamp duty is collected infrequently. Land tax would be collected more frequently at a much lower rate, every year or every quarter. But if the rate was set to make no-one worse off, the government would to wait years after properties had been sold to get back in land tax what would have earned immediately in stamp duty.

The proposal by Kevin Davis, research director of the Australian Centre of Financial Studies, in a paper released on Wednesday, is for state governments to sell their right to some of their future land tax collections in return for upfront payments.

"In each year following the abolition of stamp duty, the government will no longer receive the large revenue amount which would arise from stamp duty on house sales in that year," his paper says.