Letter to the Editor Australian Financial Review 29/01/2015 Those urging cuts to penalty rates and minimum wages for working people remind me of the blind guides, in the biblical proverb, who strain at a gnat and yet would swallow a camel. Your story "Mates' rates...
BLOG: Letters to the Editor
An unfair advantage
Letters to the Editor The Age 25/08/2014 The seemingly inevitable slide towards the haves and the have-nots in home ownership is inevitable if nothing changes. Our approach to funding the needs of the state encourages and disproportionately rewards speculative...
GST Inequity Obvious
Letters to the Editor As published in the AFR April 7th It is absurd to say switching from income tax to GST improves work incentives. Consumption equals income minus savings. A 20% GST is much the same as a 20% flat rate income tax with no tax-free threshold but with...
Water – Beneficiary Should Pay
Letters to the Editor Australian Financial Review LAND BENEFITS The comment by Marcus Spiller (AFR 3-5 January, Our cities should be allowed to water their own green shoots) on why per kl charging for water was better than “property” taxes nicely illustrates what is...
Time for Change
The Letters Editor Progress Leader (Boroondara) 5 November 2013 Time for Change Your feature on property (29/10) brings out the contrast between overseas investments in Balwyn and how increasing “house prices” are deterring first home buyers. One real estate...
Canberra Land Lease reform
Canberra Times March 17, 2013 Christopher Erskine (Time for a new lease on life, March 9, p7) is correct that it was the writings of American political economist Henry George that inspired Canberra's founders to put in place a leasehold system of land tenure. It was...
Funding Infrastructure
Letter to the Editor The Age 24/07/2012 Using the uplift in private land values to fund infrastructure projects (Doncaster railway line 'could be built for $840m) is one of the recommendations of the Ken Henry review of taxes that was immediately abandoned by the...
Empty homes, empty claims
27/01/2012 Letter to the editor The Age How are the real estate spruikers going to explain away Melbourne’s reported rental vacancy rate of 4.4% (“Melbourne Full of Empty Homes" Age 26/1/12)? Developer lobbyists were crying for new land releases when vacancy rates...
Moonee Valley Council’s three strikes
21 Nov 2011 Moonee Valley Leader Council’s three strikes HINDSIGHT (‘‘Cinema plan stalled’’, Leader, November 14) has confirmed what we suspected at the time: the first mistake by the former Moonee Valley Council commissioners was to close the Moonee Ponds Market. We...
Land Tax REDUCES Rents
Dr Gavin Putland of the Land Values Research Group drives a stake through a vampire heart in the Letters page of today's Australian Financial Review Joanne Seve (Letters, August 5) regurgitates the property lobby's favourite untruth, namely that land tax is passed on...