Prosper Australia

photo credit: Birta Rán Letter to the Age 01/06/09 Buy Australian veto David Barkley Box Hill Dear Editor, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner says the Government will not accept a push that breaches trade rules (29/5). All we hear is what it won’t do. The Rudd Government should be saying what it will do, – not [...]

photo credit: Xava du [photographer padawan] Letters to the Editor THE AGE April 29, 2009 Dr Gavin Putland The supply of land is fixed; they’re not making any more of it. Therefore the owners of land automatically constitute a cartel, even if they don’t bother organising themselves. And because access to land is essential, the [...]

photo credit: chaosinjune letter to the Monash Journal Site Value ANGE Siouclis is correct to suggest “why not trim excess expenditure and unwarranted perks and costs” at Monash Council (Your View, November 24). But to say that we all should pay the same amount of rates is wrong. That’s what Margaret Thatcher tried to push [...]

Letter to the Age Thursday June 26th WHEN we hear that the rental vacancy rate is less than 1% (“$155-a-week Lalor ‘shack’ highlights rental crisis”, The Age, 25/6), we need to remember that this figure includes only dwellings offered “to let”. If it included vacant lots and other unoccupied properties that are not on the [...]

The day after the 2008 Federal Budget, Gavin Putland (our Research Officer) sent three letters to newspapers. This one was sent to THE AGE, which exercised its editorial discretion not to publish: Cop-out On Inflation And Rents If a Budget is to be anti-inflationary, it must stimulate supply more than demand. Most importantly, it must [...]

Re. “Babcock bounces as Bear Stearns extracts more value” (March 25, item 17). The Macquarie infrastructure model is dead, not because of any failure to “internalise management”, but because of a failure to tap the benefits of infrastructure in order to amortize the capital cost. The benefit of a new road, net of tolls, is [...]

Letter to the Herald Sun Monday Jan 28th, 2008 It is appropriate that the surge in Melbourne home prices has rekindled debate on stamp duty, but not at all appropriate that the discussion has focused on the size of the duty instead of its base. Stamp duty is a transfer tax on the total value [...]

submitted to the Age on January 22nd, 2008 Dear Editor, Martin Feil and Ernest Rodeck in “The debt penalty: a matter of great import to all Australians” (Opinion, 21/1) express concern at the accumulation of foreign debt, partly due to two decades of buying foreign goods instead of Australian. It is often said that we [...]

Letter to the Age At last there is some openness from the property investor lobby! Caroline Lawrey, Housing Industry Association Victorian executive director, claimed that a property owner had the right to determine when and when it was developed (Age 16/11). With rising land values, leaving land idle and preventing its use by others causes [...]

Letter to the Age Dear Sir, So let me get this right. Messrs Howard and Costello say the economy has been going so well that the RBA intervened by increasing interest rates to slow it down again? But why should anyone want slow down a healthy economy? Did the government have it going too well? [...]