The West Australian National Party is like a dog with a bone when it comes to taxing the big iron ore miners, unbowed by their resounding defeat in the state election. Their plan is simple: increase the iron ore royalty from 25c to $5.00 a tonne and spend as much as possible in the bush […]
Read More
Boom-bust and the Australian banks
Australia experienced an increasingly gigantic bubble in land prices during the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s, and the city of Melbourne became bubble-central. Michael Cannon provides an excellent account of the period in The Land Boomers. Henry George’s masterwork Progress and Poverty had hit the streets in the United States in 1879 and […]
Read MoreLeadership is more than presiding, Gladys
Economist Peter Abelson has dropped a bomb on Sydney’s madly expensive land market, asserting the usual demand and supply equations have little influence on prices while major positive benefits are available from ending Stamp Duty and using land tax. His views only came to light after journalist Adam Creighton used FOI to prise his report […]
Read MoreGame of Mates – Melbourne Book Launch
In 2015 Dr. Cameron Murray released an influential paper investigating the nexus between relationship networks and land rezonings in Queensland. Fairfax journalist Michael Pascoe stated the paper ‘should have brought down state and local governments, sparked a royal commission and radically changed the Australian housing industry’. Murray has built on this game theory approach in […]
Read MoreProsper’s Evolution
Dear supporters, The work of Prosper Australia is being discussed more often by government and independent economists. More economic journalists are now referring to the good sense of introducing a range of better land taxation measures. Meetings with the Victorian Treasury and the State Revenue Office are becoming commonplace. Our work has been referenced by […]
Read More1 + 2 adds up!
These two interesting quotes assist to make the Georgist case that land prices and taxes are both problematical:- (1) Richard Cobden: “Cheated, Robbed and Bamboozled” “I warn ministers, and I warn landlords and the aristocracy of this country, against forcing on the attention of the middle and industrial classes, the subject of taxation ….. If you […]
Read MoreOur lives are like a Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel painting
by Dr Gavin Putland WORKERS (i) pay rent, (ii) help their employers to pay rent, and (iii) raise some of the next generation of rent-payers. LAND SPECULATORS (i) receive economic rent for the gifts of nature, (ii) take the credit for providing them, and (iii) lobby governments for an ever-increasing supply of rent-payers. BANKS (i) […]
Read MoreThe fragrant vagrant is not a rose by another name
Melbourne City Council is wringing its hands again over developer land vagrancy – prime sites deliberately held vacant or with disused, dangerous buildings to assist developer lobbying of government for rezoning or advantageous building permits. The issue last hit the news when a wall collapsed at the old CUB site in Swanston Street in 2013 […]
Read MoreVacancy a Sign of Systemic Failure
Prosper President Catherine Cashmore is quoted in The Age with Land Bankers raise ire of the well-heeled. “Morally it’s not a good thing to do,” she said. “But let’s not blame the investors.” She pointed the finger at government policy: “The nation has been breastfed on the notion that the way to fund their retirement […]
Read MoreThe Metricon Judgement
In March last year, the NSW Supreme Court set aside the NSW Office of State Revenue’s assessment for land tax in 2009-13 on certain lands at Terranora in the Tweed Valley held by Metricon. The developer bought the $60m aggregation to subdivide for residential use. It side-stepped a land tax liability of around $1.2m per […]
Read More