As the local MSP, John Swinney ought to know Perthshire well.
He ought to know the average price for a detached family home in the area and perhaps that is why we saw him perform a screeching U-turn this week on his new tax for homebuyers.
With the average price of a detached family home in Perth and Kinross a hefty £260,000, his punishing proposals would have stung hard-working people in his own back yard.
To use the parlance of the property market, this week saw the Finance Secretary getting gazumped.
In October last year he unveiled his plan for a whopping 10% tax rate on the value of homes over £250,000. It meant that if you were thinking of buying a house for £295,000, suddenly you’d have to shell out thousands more for the privilege.
We in the Scottish Conservatives demanded he have a rethink. Then, unfortunately for Mr Swinney, George Osborne announced new rates which slashed stamp duty rates.
Under the Conservative tax cut, stamp duty on a £295,000 house in Broughty Ferry, Perth or St Andrews now costs £4,750, or £2,000 less than the “Swinney tax”.
It left the SNP facing up to a rather large headache.
Mr Swinney changed his mind this week to ease the pain both his and ours though not by as much as we’d have liked.
We will be pushing him to pass on a much bigger tax cut over the coming weeks so no one is worse off.
This isn’t about helping the rich. As Mr Swinney, pictured, well knows, people in Perthshire and Dundee who just want to buy a family home aren’t rich.
It’s about giving a break to families trying to get a three-bedroom home and who already pay too much tax and don’t need clobbering any more.
It’s been a thoroughly energising debate to have. And it’s a debate you’re going to hear a lot more of in the coming years.
Yesterday, David Cameron was in Edinburgh to publish our plans to transfer more tax powers to Holyrood. This week’s battle over stamp duty at Holyrood is just a foretaste of what is to come.
This time next year, Mr Swinney will be setting out the new Scottish rate of income tax when he will have to decide whether to raise or reduce income tax in Scotland.
And as a result of our agreement after the referendum, all income tax will be set in Edinburgh.
Suddenly Holyrood won’t just be the place where they spend our money. It will be MSPs who will be deciding how much of it to take.
They’ll be a direct link from the decisions Scottish ministers make, straight to the right hand side of your pay cheque.
I’m looking forward greatly to this new future for Scotland. Our stance is pretty simple the Scottish Conservatives believe we should do everything we can do reduce the taxes that are coming to the Parliament.
We need a competitive edge in Scotland to offset our geographical issues as a nation on the northern edge of Europe.
Of course we need to be responsible. Scotland has always had a keen social conscience and the last thing we need is to cut our public services back to the bone.
And with budgets likely to be tight for a few years to come, we will need to think big if we are going to help family budgets. But as a believer in strong but limited government, I don’t believe we have to accept tax rises. There are ways to find savings.
Here’s a place to start one thinktank recently calculated that no fewer than 43 members of staff across the public sector are being paid more than the £140,647 salary of the First Minister. Is that really justified?
As Chancellor George Osborne said earlier this week, the fact that tax powers are being devolved across the UK will lead to a new era of competitive taxation, with different parts of the UK striving to gain an edge.
I’m up for that. We can do this in Scotland.
And I hope this is a settled future for Scotland which means we put the referendum debate over the last four years to bed.
Over the last two years, we’ve spent quite enough time talking about Yes or No and which powers should come to Scotland. The powers are now here and more are coming. It’s time we got into a real, exciting debate about how we use them and how we offer the best deal for taxpayers.
That’s the kind of debate we saw in the Scottish Parliament on stamp duty this week. And both Labour and the SNP have had a warning shot don’t think you can whack up taxes on Scotland without very good reason indeed.