The Henry Tax Review’s highlighting of Land Tax as a policy direction is a welcome and encouraging development, says Prosper Australia.
“This is THE tool to liberate the people of Australia from their current financial difficulties,” Prosper Australia’s Karl Fitzgerald said today. “Consider the enormous economic benefits this reform offers.
“Taxing land will provide real incentives to spur land use to the best and highest use. It will prompt a boom in investment and vastly improved access to land for all – creating a tidal wave of economic and social progress.
“The Great Australian Dream of home ownership – now impossible for a whole generation of Australians – would quickly become reality.
“I cannot overstate the potential benefits of re-basing tax onto land holding. Yes, this means introducing a tax, but it also means many others can and would be eliminated.
A land tax would allow sweeping cuts to income taxes, the end of the much hated GST and the elimination of up to 123 other regressive, unfair and exemption-riddled tax mechanisms.
It must be noted that Prosper Australia’s energetic support for a federal land tax is not a proposal to increase the government’s tax revenues as a proportion of GDP or its powers or to advance the interests of any group over another.
“This is a technical economic issue, not a morality play.
“We value that Australia is a low tax country and want it to stay that way. Land tax aims squarely at further improving our quality of life through discouraging the hoarding of land by attaching a holding cost to it.
“More land would become available at a much lower cost. Allied with higher incomes from lower taxes elswhere, this shifting of the tax burden would galvanize activity and opportunity.
Fitzgerald called on all Australians to embrace land tax in the interests of an equitable and just society.
“Land Tax is beautiful. It is impossible to avoid, is transparent to all and cheap to collect,” Fitzgerald concluded. “The Henry Review proposal needs our careful consideration.”
Media Comment: Karl Fitzgerald (03) 9670 2754
I don’t know, I’m cynical, depressed, negative and defeatist.
I cant see anyway a landtax would be possible, appealing or successful. It’s truly hopeless.
I think it has to be approached indirectly. Deprive State and Local government and Statutory authorities of any other sources of revenue and let land revenue be fully available to them if they wish it.
Link land revenue directly with infrastructure investment.
Switch the focus from the taxing to the investing. We need a Department of Public Works and Revenue, which collects the rent and invests it, but the emphasis must be on the investing and the building, not on the taxing.
The georgite love of tax is really crazy, impossible to explain.
Hi Bernard,
Well you sort of explained the georgist love did you not? “We need a Department of Public Works and Revenue, *which collects the rent and invests it*, but the emphasis must be on the investing and the building, not on the taxing” – George focuses more on the “investing” – when he does focus on the “taxing” its to make the point, why should we pay 249 other taxes, when we can pay just one? “Investing via efficiency” I suppose. Once you place emphasis on both, I think people will understand.