Prosper Australia

  The Melbourne City Council has been urged to apply differential rates “to sites defined as vacant or derelict” by its Future of Melbourne committee. They name to shame the Savoy Tavern on Spencer Street, the Argus building on Latrobe Street and bare land at 567 Collins Street as examples of developer-owned blight. Councillors loathe [...]

Regarding the recent ACT Liberal Party scare campaign against rates, Dr Terry Dwyer writes: Being fundamentally disinterested in political games but keenly interested in policy and good government (which, judging from Mr Slipper’s emails, sadly does not always seem to be uppermost in the minds of all politicians), I have sent the attached letter to [...]

Council Rates: Who Pays More? The land speculator or family home? Under CIV/ NAV the land speculator typically gets a 30% discount in rates over the family home. Capital Improved Valuation penalises homeowners for improvements to their house. Look at your rating notice to see what percentage your improvements account for. That is the subsidy [...]

Melbourne City Council is selling lanes to developers, according to The Age today. It makes a pretty penny, too, having pocketed $1.2 million from the sale of part of three lanes in the last 12 months alone. The article sparked an intense debate on the newspaper’s blog.  Sales are energetically supported by citizens disgusted by [...]

    photo credit: Schaffner Sometimes the ignorance of experts makes my blood boil.  Why can’t they do the arithmetic, the sums plainly before them? The Victorian Transport Plan will cost $38 billion and produce benefits of $180 billion, according to a state-commissioned report by Ernst and Young.  If these numbers are right, the Plan [...]

photo credit: tholmb Letter to the Editor – The Post (W.A) Niels Charlier Jolimont Dear Editor, Re your report, ” ‘Wrong’ rates ping home builder” (POST 15/8). Gill Vivian is absolutely right when she says she is being penalised for helping to improve her suburb, and that the system is wrong. The alternative is however [...]

photo credit: nicksarebi In the past year more than 81,000 Victorians have received rates default notices, which then impose a 12 per cent interest charge on the debts. Council Rates are again in the headlines, with affordability pressures crunching into a large number of rates payment defaults. How ironic is it that the charges that [...]

Today’s report on the Melbourne 2030 urban growth boundary cries out for a comment from Prosper Australia members. Melbourne University academic Rob Moodie rolled out the usual suspects in recommending that dwellings per hectare improve on the urban fringe, that there be a smaller, more intense concentration of transport hubs and lastly, the latest bureaucratic [...]