“Two secure jobs and a good deposit are no longer enough to buy a home. First home buyers must make a life-long vow of poverty as well. It is irresponsible to expect such a sacrifice,” Collyer said. “Do not underestimate their anger and frustration at being denied land ownership and its civic benefits.”
BLOG: affordability
A Grounded Tax System for Australia
photo credit: Timmy Toucan You are cordially invited to an interactive seminar: A Grounded Tax System for Australia Thursday 24 February 2011, 7.00 pm Presenter David Collyer Why work for wages when tax takes the cream? Why risk a business when government sucks your...
Liberate labor and enterprise
The reform challenge for our beloved country is to discard the taxes that weigh on effort and creativity, and to put them instead on economic rents, like land and mining.
Australia’s world-beating real estate
A soundly-based Land Value Tax to reduce the taxes on labor and enterprise would restore the rewards to effort and propel the economy forward like a rocket.
The pain in falling land prices
photo credit: Travis S. The US housing market is a living hell. Homeowners are being boiled alive. The price of land was bid up to staggering multiples of incomes, until it no longer made sense to buy a house. And then the trend turned, hard and fast. One in five US...
Will ninjas burst the Great Australian Housing Bubble?
photo credit: The Library of Congress Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. Warren Buffett In the US housing bubble, banks and financiers gave a mortgage to anyone with a discernable pulse. NINJAs (No Income, No Job, no Assets) were...
Selling alleys and lanes: latifundia at work.
Melbourne City Council is selling lanes to developers, according to The Age today. It makes a pretty penny, too, having pocketed $1.2 million from the sale of part of three lanes in the last 12 months alone. The article sparked an intense debate on the newspaper’s...
Melbourne’s secret plan
photo credit: Lucia. . . A secret map of Melbourne’s transport plans for the next 30 years was published in The Age yesterday. Doubts were raised about its authenticity (weakly, unconvincingly) by the Victorian government. Average householders may shrug, but this is a...
Mr Presley has left the stadium.
photo credit: RR and Camera At the peak of his career Elvis Presley was so popular audiences would sit and clap at the end of the night, demanding encore after encore. They couldn’t get enough. The only way to end the demands and disperse the crowd was for him to...
Treasury to Gillard: “Fix Housing.”
photo credit: itmpa Last week Treasury made public its Red Book – the economic advice it gives to the incoming government. In it, Treasury lays out a big, bold reform agenda. On housing, the Red Book is scathing: “Access to adequate housing affects all Australians...