Prosper Australia

27/01/2012 Letter to the editor The Age How are the real estate spruikers going to explain away Melbourne’s reported rental vacancy rate of 4.4% (“Melbourne Full of Empty Homes” Age 26/1/12)? Developer lobbyists were crying for new land releases when vacancy rates were low to provide affordable (read “isolated and without infrastructure”) housing, so what’s [...]

21 Nov 2011 Moonee Valley Leader Council’s three strikes HINDSIGHT (‘‘Cinema plan stalled’’, Leader, November 14) has confirmed what we suspected at the time: the first mistake by the former Moonee Valley Council commissioners was to close the Moonee Ponds Market. We lost fresh food retail variety. Their second mistake was to sell the market [...]

Dr Gavin Putland of the Land Values Research Group drives a stake through a vampire heart in the Letters page of today’s Australian Financial Review Joanne Seve (Letters, August 5) regurgitates the property lobby’s favourite untruth, namely that land tax is passed on to tenants. In its crudest form, this argument expects the reader to [...]

photo credit: AveLardo Letter to the Editor – The Age Bryan Kavanagh, Glen Waverley It’s sickening to see the two major parties compete to sell Australians out as they kow-tow to foreign interests in connection with our natural resources. As Julia Gillard accedes to the requirements of the big miners, Tony Abbott says she’s still [...]

photo credit: Gianni Dominici Letter to the Editor – The Age April 2nd, Karl Williams, Tecoma First home buyers sink WHATEVER you think of the ”buyer’s strike” aimed against buying homes at the top of the property cycle (Buyers strike goes viral), the time must surely have come to question our passive endorsement of ever-escalating [...]

photo credit: HikingArtist.com Letter to the Editor Gavin Putland, LVRG, Melbourne 02/02/2011 THE value of land embraced by the latest extension of the urban growth boundary has jumped from $25,000 to $375,000 a hectare, raising the land tax bill for the average 40-hectare lot from $2975 a year to $294,975 a year (The Age, 1/2). [...]

photo credit: Darwin Bell Letter to the Editor – The Age 24/11 David Barkly, Nunawading Flat tax our future MELBOURNE will become more and more unliveable until population pressure is reduced by decentralisation. Part of the reason for Melbourne’s excessive growth at the expense of the rest of the state is the unfair distribution of [...]

photo credit: Sushanta Meh Letter to the Editor – AFR 31/08/2010 Gavin R. Putland, Melbourne Instead of prosecuting small businesses for making mistakes with capital gains tax concessions (“Tax Office hits small business”, AFR, August 30), why not abolish the concessions and use the extra revenue to lighten the compliance burdens concerning personal income tax [...]

photo credit: Catherinette Rings Steampunk Letter to the Editor – AFR 26/08/2010 Gavin R. Putland, Melbourne The High Court of Australia’s decision to strike down the Cadia copper royalties — on the ground that the NSW Government didn’t own the copper — is a vindication of Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s proposal for a federal resource [...]

photo credit: ~Brenda-Starr~ Letter to the Editor – AFR 25/05/2010 Bryan Kavanagh, Glen Waverley Ross Garnaut and Ken Henry are undoubtedly correct about the benefits of the so-called super-profits ‘tax’ on miners. It’s actually a resource rent and acts vastly differently from a tax. Where taxes notoriously fine and destroy industry and production, natural resource [...]