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 [...]

Land in Australia should be dirt cheap. Outstanding access to land ought be a national advantage, generously conferred by a loving government upon its people.

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: Dean Terry If ever we needed any more motivation to burn the midnight oil, the Brumby government’s latest handout to the property lobby is just this. Just nine months since he handed out free lunch with the 90,000 blocks of zoned land announced in March, Brumby has now extended the 2030 boundary to [...]

The front cover of today’s Herald Sun has a huge photo of Horse Stud owner Steve Spiteri (looking hard done by!) with a caption: ‘Thanks Premier: Steve Hits Paydirt’. Yesterday’s announcement to rezone all land residential within Melbourne’s 2030 boundary has made landowners, typically land bankers and the occasional farmer on the edge of the [...]

Prosper Australia today applauded the State Government’s announcement for taking housing affordability more seriously. However, questions must be asked about who benefits most from this announcement. “Today’s declaration of residential zoning has made Victoria’s land bankers more money in a day than many earn in a lifetime.” “Questions must be asked why the government is [...]

Below we can see 2 examples of former Commonwealth land being released ‘to the market’. Snapped up by a developer in Melbourne’s most impoverished neighbourhood (Braybrook), such large ‘land banks’ are manipulated to drip feed houses to the markets so that high prices are assured. The building of homes is moderated by land bankers to [...]