ABOUT PROSPER AUSTRALIA

Our Vision

Our vision is a just and equitable society, created by ensuring everyone who benefits from our land, natural resources and natural monopolies pays a fair rent for their use.

We have everything we need. Our earth, and the bold achievements we have attained together through human progress, are more than enough to create a fair society where every person can benefit from our shared wealth.

With rising inequality and environmental degradation, it can be difficult to be optimistic about our future. Many of us who contribute to our society through hard work struggle to pay our bills. Meanwhile, those of us who hold rights over our natural resources are allowed to profit from value they did not create.

We believe that taxes on the hard-working, productive areas of society such as income tax, payroll tax, company tax and stamp duty need to be reduced. Instead, we should be taxing unearned streams of superprofits that derive from exclusive access to our finite natural resources including land, groundwater and minerals. A tax shift for Australia will take the pressure off workers and the productive sectors of our society while conserving that on which all economies depend: our natural environment.

At Prosper, we talk to policymakers, politicians and the public about the tax shift we need for our future. We can use our tax system as a powerful lever towards a stronger, more productive, fairer and more sustainable society.

Our Mission

Our Mission is to increase the proportion of economic rent in the tax base, ensuring the unearned income derived from land and natural resources is fairly taxed.

We aim to remove the excessive burden of taxes from income, thereby enabling enterprise to flourish and people to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

We aim to educate the community to understand land value, how it arises, how it is monopolised, and how it can be shared for the good, honouring the legacy of Henry George

Who is Prosper Australia?

We are an independent, non-profit membership-based association with a focus on the management of exclusive and essential resource allocation through tax. 

This includes the taxation of land and other natural resources, but also the public-interest management of public utilities and other natural monopolies, as well as government-instituted monopolies such as taxi and fishing licences. It is our position that unearned and unproductive streams of private income which derive from these elements of our economy should be more heavily taxed. This will allow us to ease taxes on the hard working and innovative parts of our society, building a more equitable and more efficient economy for our future.

Through Prosper Australia Research Institute is we conduct economic research on land and housing related topics, with relevance to public policy making. We host public events, and advocate to all levels of Government.

Beginnings

Prosper Australia grew out of the appetite for social reform during the progressive era between 1890 and 1920. Inspired by US journalist, economist and politician Henry George, a broad and worldwide movement grew to advocate for shifting taxes from labour to land. In the 1910s and 1920s, our journal, Progress, had a distribution of 20,000. Our work today is largely sustained by the generosity of movement leaders in that era. 

Legacy

Successes of Georgists in Australia include a Federal land tax introduced in 1910, securing a fairer local government ratings base of site value for Victoria in 1920, and the ACT leasehold system which was successful until the 1970s.

Prosper Today

With a slowing economy, increasing inequality and an the degradation of our environment all pressing issues for Australians, there has never been a stronger mandate for a tax shift. We conduct research both independently and commissioned, host public lectures and discussions, and conduct advocacy campaigns for the reforms we want to achieve. And over one hundred years later, we still publish our print journal, Progress.

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Sketch image of Henry George