With so many Australians in impossible mortgage debt, why is it considered non-U to talk about the incredibly high land component of house sales at 80%+?

Why do current politicians cling to the ridiculous notion that high house prices are a matter of an inadequate supply of homes, when land prices represent the private capitalisation of unearned publicly-generated land rent? Shouldn’t we be taxing land prices more and incomes less?

How is that Australia’s standard of living led the world when we had land taxes at all three levels of government, and Australian politicians understood the evils spilling from land price speculation and treating land as a commodity? They no longer do. Why is this? Are they blind? Ignorant?

How is it that our politicians once discussed and saw the need to found the Australian Capital Territory on a leasehold system of landholding in 1913 if real estate speculators were to be kept at bay. They no longer think this way!

We now tax people’s incomes and their purchases which, added to the funding of rampantly escalating land prices, create untenable levels of private debt. Doesn’t this situation threaten of financial collapse?

How is it that Australia leads the world with its average land price now representing $375,000 per head of population? $10.3736 trillion in total land prices is some amount for such a relatively small population! (ABS 5204.061)

Has the completely misguided protection of banking and real estate’s interests in property spec, and allowing them to make their profits at any cost to the citizenry, delivered Australia, which used to know how to have affordable housing, to the door of economic depression?

The answers?

We have fiscal turpitude now ruling the nation.

THE KING RENT SEEKER

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People aren’t happy. The number of things about which they’re complaining in connection with the cost-of living are legion, but the overarching financial stumbling block is Australia’s incredibly high land prices, currently $375,000 per head of population.

Taxes and the extent of government spending get a good going over, but paradoxically the tax most complained about on talkback radio is the land tax. Lumping all taxes together is unhelpful, because a land tax is different from all other taxes, insofar as it can’t be passed on in prices because it’s in the nature of a ‘rent’.

Before Australia ever had an income tax, or a goods and services tax, Australian politicians respected this feature about taxes on land prices. We had land taxes at all three levels of government, and at that time our standard of living was the best in the world.

The USA had more taxes on property values, too: –

This thinking changed at the Great Depression when rent-seeking neoclassical economics began to inflict its nefarious regime upon world economies. We were told there’s not enough surplus product, enough economic rent, to be taxed back out of economies. That’s wrong, of course; there’s always sufficient economic rent in a nation for the running of the economy, but we allow most of these publicly-generated incomes to flow to companies and some private individuals.

We need to discriminate between the range and type of various taxes and to make the necesssary change – for prosperity’s sake!

…. 50 YEARS ON

Many people didn’t like what Sir John Kerr did to Gough Whitlam and his Labor government.

However, the election overwhelmingly endorsed the Fraser Liberal government.

I’ve argued that people voted against Whitlam because, experiencing the ills of the worldwide recession at the time, they voted from their ‘hip pocket nerve’. They were in debt and feeling unwell financially. An incumbent government won’t win an election following a recession.

This view is rarely provided as the main reason swinging voters supported the Liberal Party at the 1975 federal double dissolution election after the Whitlam dismissal.

Today, we remember those who died in wars.

We celebrate Armistice Day on 11 November 1918 as the end of WWI, but what caused the war? Was it the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?

That may have been the trigger, but Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium didn’t help. And Great Britain considered Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself was getting to be a threat.

Like the USA v China today.

But behind that, economies hadn’t been working particularly well since the 1893 to 1897 depression.

With Germany becoming a great industrial power, perhaps we just needed a “good, short war” to put it back in its place.

WWII can similarly be seen, at least partly, as Germany’s response to the near impossible conditions imposed upon them as reparations from WWI, particularly by France. This heavy economic yoke was worsened by the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The rise of Adolph Hiltler was fundamentally an economic issue.

This website discusses the upcoming 2027 depression. If history is a guide, it’s likely the depression could herald WWIII.

The foes have yet to be finally decided.

But the 2027 depression will not just descend upon us in 2027. There are the usual warnings, obvious to most Henry Georgists. Although the cost-of-living has become intolerable, as it does before all financial depressions, people fail to see why this is so.

Few people understand the connection between escalated land prices and financial collapse: i.e. that land price are pathological.

A young Robert Gordon Menzies did.

For prosperity to break out from these doldrums, we need to tax our land prices away; not our incomes and purchases.

Total land prices per head of population $375,000! (ABS 5204.061)

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/07/us-consumer-sentiment-shutdown

Great wealth disparity always leads to social ruction and financial depressions.

The political choice is then between revolution or war.

Knowing that a call to patriotism is a winner, the uber-wealthy choose war.

The 2027 to 2030 depression is falling due.

With beer, circus and rent seeking, everything is pointing to a depression and war.

We’re not yet ready for a peaceful transition to Georgism.

3AW’s Tom Elliott has been speaking to ex-premier, Jeff Kennett, about Victoria’s debt this morning.

Yes, Victoria’s borrowings are a problem. So are the federal government’s.

If the federal government funded the states and territories better for their necessary services and infrastructure, they wouldn’t need to borrow: right? Yes, that’s right.

But then the federal government would get into debt and have to borrow much more: right?

No; that’s not right.

The federal government issues the national currency, so it doesn’t need to borrow it – from anyone. It can fund its so-called ‘deficit budgets’ – without necessarily raising additional taxation.

In fact, it is ‘surplus‘ federal budgets that forebode problems. They denote inadequate spending and usually portend of national financial distress.

Neoliberal ‘austerity’ economists and politicians, such as Jeff Kennett and Paul Keating (“The recession we had to have“) don’t understand that no governments need to issue bonds to ‘borrow’.

But it’s a very difficult point to make that when the federal government spends, it does not spend from taxation. Nor does it need to ‘borrow’ back. Why would it?

It’s the impossible private mortgage debt that’s about to bring Australia to its knees.

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Click on the above to see Stephen Zarlenga’s full account of Henry George on ‘money’.

The lack of settled science in economics doesn’t undermine its status as a science. Classical economics clearly distinguished factors of production—land, labor, and capital—and their returns (rent, wages, interest). Yet, special interests have used neoclassical economics to conflate ‘land’ and ‘capital’ to obscure the proper distribution of wealth, and to maintain their rogue rent seeking mechanism.

As large-scale political questions are usually founded in the science of economics, this confusion has fuelled political debate. Macaulay’s quip about gravity not being accepted had it badly affected the powerful, highlights how financial interests have been able to distort economic truths. Vested interests thrive on muddled thinking, perpetuating economic policies that favour them over the general public.

Although cooperation of the public has driven human progress and shaped the body politic, times such as these have seen self-interest and greed arise that develop a retrogression eroding reason and integration. Society becomes fractured because economic rents have been unduly privatised.

Rent nevertheless remains the glue to bind this increasingly vast social fracture.

That’s a lonely proposition!

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