Former journalist Lisa Pryor sums up the frustrations of the many at the quarterly roll out of baby boomers complaining about Land Taxes on investment properties. She writes in her It’s Grim Down the South Coast for the Well Off :
Land tax encourages better use of land. An annual tax bill gives the owners of multiple properties an incentive to rent them out, at least some of the time, to pay the bill rather than leaving the properties empty, except for a scattering of boogie boards and dog-eared packs of Uno, until the whim strikes to spend the weekend there. For the same reason, it gives owners of vacant land an incentive to build.
Well done Lisa on a well written article! It would be nice to see a few more journo’s speak out about the inefficient use of our most precious resource – land. Go on, quote us on 2,317 vacant properties in Melbourne’s inner CBD. Yes that’s a 7% genuine vacancy rate rather than the 0.7% publicised rate.
We must remember that capitalism is based on reward for effort, and certainly not a reward for the hoarding of prime locations. Delve deeper and you will see how the encouragement of speculation on natural resources by government’s worldwide has caused the GFC.
