The second item in today’s Victorian API news demonstrates the Australian Property Institute is losing its way:

“Property taxes shoulder Vic budget

THE Victorian government is becoming addicted to property taxes, which will raise over $6 billion in forward estimates for the 2013-14 Victorian State Budget.” [My emphasis]

Now “becoming addicted to property taxes” is in no way exhortatory, or pushing a barrow, is it?

The API has apparently got to the stage where the organisation, founded by statutory valuers in 1910 mind you, now joins the ranks of urgers and touts, such as the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, to decry land-based revenues.

Of course, I was impelled to reply as follows:

“THE Victorian government is becoming addicted to property taxes, which will raise over $6 billion in forward estimates for the 2013-14 Victorian State Budget.”

An institute purportedly representing valuers—it was after all founded in 1910 by Commonwealth Taxation Office valuers—should know a very good case for reforming and extending current state land taxes was made in a thoroughgoing report by the Henry Tax Review panel. The words “becoming addicted” in the sentence above therefore disgraces both the API and the person who wrote them.

–       Bryan Kavanagh AAPI

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This is the professional institute of which I was once proud to be a member.  Once known as the Australian Institute of Valuers, it is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from just another branch of the property lobby.