Prosper Australia

16 May 2013 MELBOURNE:- The federal budget initiative to omit conveyancing Stamp Duty for retirees down-sizing to a smaller home acknowledges just how destructive and behavior-distorting this vile tax is, says Prosper Australia. “This is a disgusting, economically dishonest policy,” David Collyer Campaign Manager Prosper Australia said today. “Again, the baby boomer generation is being [...]

15 May 2013 MELBOURNE:- Yesterday’s federal budget highlights again Australia’s unbalanced reliance on wage and salary taxation for government revenues, says Prosper Australia. “Taxation discourages. That is why we tax gambling, alcohol and tobacco. Unfortunately, it has the same effect on work. We tax it so heavily it must also be a very bad economic [...]

by Bryan Kavanagh AAPI Today’s Victorian API news demonstrates the Australian Property Institute is at risk of losing its way: “Property taxes shoulder Vic budget The Victorian government is becoming addicted to property taxes, which will raise over $6 billion in forward estimates for the 2013-14 Victorian State Budget.” [My emphasis] The phrase  “becoming addicted to property [...]

  Last week I offered a solution to the blight caused by vacant or disused sites in central Melbourne. Everyone is diminished by landowners leaving valuable land unused while they agitate for rezoning profits. The Age’s Bruce Guthrie hopped into the discussion for a hand-wringing but offered no solution.  The problem would be reduced by [...]

“When you’ve paid your rent, you’ve paid your tax.”  “So what’s a Georgist?” you ask. A Georgist (or at least a “full-on” Georgist) is someone who says there should be no taxes except those on land values, payable by the owners — and is keen to explain that “land” doesn’t include buildings. (It does include [...]

The mascot of the anti-land-tax campaign is the “poor widow” — you know, the one who will allegedly be forced out of her home because she doesn’t have the cash flow to pay the tax on the astronomical value of the land under her house, and who can’t be compensated by cuts in income tax because [...]

  The latest annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey ranks all Australian capitals as Severely Unaffordable. They’re right and the statistics back them. Housing has two elements, the building and the land.  What fluctuates is the land price; structures are worth only what they cost to build.  High land prices mean current buyers are committing [...]

Changing the GST was always intended to be hard and is getting harder by the week. Under the so-called intergovernmental agreement on implementation of the GST, any change in the rate or the base required the unanimous approval of the Federal, State and Territory governments. Although that “agreement” can be unilaterally abrogated by Canberra, neither [...]

15 November 2012 The mining investment boom that carried Australia though the Global Financial Crisis is declining rapidly and new engines of growth are urgently needed to steer around the ‘Controlled Depression’ that is driving the world into a spiral of misery – country by country. “Tax reform is something we can do by ourselves, [...]

The education of the public via mainstream media continues to grow with Jessica Irvine writing in the Herald Sun today: “State governments do apply some land taxes, particularly on investment properties. But a major recommendation of the Henry review was for a broader land tax that could go a long way to providing state governments [...]