TWITTER Stephen Punwasi‏ @StephenPunwasi 10 hours ago

𝐒𝐎𝐅𝐓 𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 [,sôft•‘landiNG] 𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑛.

1. A mythical scenario in real estate, where no one loses money.

2. A lie you tell real estate buyers as you unload into a declining market.

𝘈𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘚𝘦𝘦: 𝘐𝘵 𝘖𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘎𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘜𝘱

I was honoured to know Phil Day (1924 – 17 March 2011). He was a colleague on the Land Values Research Group.

Phil was a town planner who, having “seen the cat”, worked unassumingly but tenaciously for the principle of drawing revenue from the use of land instead of taxing labour and capital.

Phil committed his thoughts to two books, “LAND: The elusive quest for social justice, taxation reform and a sustainable planetary environment” (Australian Academic Press, Brisbane, 1995) and “Hijacked Inheritance: the Triumph of Dollar Darwinism” (CopyRight Publishing, Brisbane, 2005).

Phil was a great administrator and town planner.

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Obituary: Dr Phil Day

Staff writers, Brisbane Courier Mail April 20, 2011

Dr Phil Day was a progressive advocate for reforms in planning, development control and taxation. He was born in Brisbane in 1924 and died in Brisbane in 2011.

Dr Phil Day’s achievements in town and country planning during any one of his senior official appointments would have been worth commemorating. Summed up, they represent an outstanding record of public service and an enduring contribution to public policy.

Then, for more than 20 years after official retirement, until his death on March 17, he continued advocating progressive reforms in planning, development control and taxation.

Born in 1924 and raised in Yeronga, Philip Denny Day completed primary school in 1937 by winning the coveted Lilley Medal in the state scholarship examination.

After finishing school at Anglican Church Grammar School, he began a law degree but enlisted in World War II as soon as permitted. During his seven years in the Army he learned Japanese and served for three years in the occupation forces in Japan as a commissioned intelligence officer.

Following repatriation, he graduated in 1953. He joined the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra and from 1955-59 also held part-time elected office on the ACT Advisory Council. He moved to Sydney where he qualified in town and country planning and joined the Department of Local Government. Dr Day transferred to the Department of Decentralisation and Development in 1968 and rose to director.

There, he promoted growth centres as the best vehicle for stimulating population growth in regional towns and significantly influenced the Commonwealth’s growth centres policy of the 1970s.

“There’s no particular magic about it,” he observed later in his typically dismissive approach to his own achievements. “Commerce and industry and population are attracted to centres where public decisions are made.”

Dissatisfied with ineffective implementation of regional policy in NSW, Dr Day returned to Queensland as Brisbane City Council’s director of town planning. His commitment to the public interest resulted in clashes with the strong-minded but development-orientated lord mayor, Clem Jones.

He left to join the redoubtable Professor Lewis Keeble in the Department of Regional and Town Planning in the University of Queensland and was head of school from 1977-80. From 1980-82 he was seconded as director of the Australian Institute of Urban Studies before returning to his teaching role, from which he retired in 1988.

In 1989, as a member of the Chalk Committee of Inquiry into Valuation and Rating, Dr Day wrote its final report. To this day it stands as a landmark exposition of city financing.

As editor of Queensland Planner for 16 years from 1987, he influenced professional opinion through plain-spoken editorials and attacks on transgressions of good planning policy.

He is remembered with respect by a generation of planners he educated.

Queensland planners treasured Dr Day as one of the consciences of the profession, an intellectual giant yet unaffectedly modest, and honoured him with Life Fellowship of the Planning Institute.

In retirement he authored a flow of forthright articles for, among others, The Courier-Mail and property consultants King & Co’s magazine King’s Counsel.

His book Hijacked Inheritance, derived from his doctorate earned at age 77, explored the merits of land value taxation, which has gained recent respectability in the Henry tax review as a simple and non-distorting form of raising revenue. In Dr Day’s words, “charging for the use or consumption of the nation’s natural resources would go a long way towards reducing the necessity for income taxes on productive labour and capital.”

Other abiding interests included the “lawyerisation” of planning, the process-heavy planning legislation in Queensland and decentralisation. Dr Day was a visionary who argued that concentration of population in the southeast would entail construction of inevitably unaffordable infrastructure, as Brisbane’s tunnels are turning out to be.

In his latter years he was upset at the creeping dominance of economic rationalism that starved departmental budgets, corroding the foundations of the tenured professional public service crucial to giving governments advice.

Friends, colleagues and students mentored by him can best honour his memory by continuing to uphold public interest planning and progressing the causes he held dear.

Dr Day is survived by children Diana, Michael, Richard, wife Jinn, grandchildren and former wife Nancy.

Australia has a new population policy.

The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy provides a rundown.

OK, so we want immigrants to settle into our regions. However, there’s not one decent idea to attract them there. We have to try to force them to the regions, and once there, trick them into staying.

Few noticed the population drift from the mainland to Tasmania where property was cheaper in 2004. Or, the current Sydney to Melbourne drift.

People will move to where land is cheaper during booms, selling down from a dearer city to a cheaper one in order to cash up a little.

The principle of land value taxation, argued here for economic reasons, would also act naturally to generate social movement, of migrants or otherwise, into the regions where land is cheaper and where the land tax would be significantly less.

Makes sense, if other taxes are reduced concomitantly and , of course, “Australia’s Future Tax System” recommended a significant land tax in order to abolish more than 100 counter-productive taxes.

Ain’t nothing counter-productive about a decent decentralising land value tax.

The video above is an incisive exposition on the current state of play of Australia’s residential real estate markets. Take heed!

It would be nice to believe Tony and Martin might take their analyses to the next level, to expose the devastating socio-economic role of land prices per se and the taxing of incomes.

“In America, despite the amazing rise in productivity we’ve had in the last 30 years, real wages have actually gone down. All of the increase in productivity has been taken by the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, called the FIRE sector, almost all of it by the financial sector. So all of this growth has been siphoned off, not taking the form of rising living standards, but taking the form of debt service, mainly interest and fees.”

• Michael Hudson

Unpublished Letter to The Age October 10th, 2017

How ironic that boss Ian Narev is concerned that global wage growth has been “relatively weak” (‘CBA boss says sorry over ATM scandal’, The Age, 7/10).

Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations that privatised land rent adds one-third to costs: “This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third.”

The American social philosopher Henry George agreed with Smith that land rent needs to be publicly captured if wages and earned profits were not to suffer at the hands of those who seek to extract what amounts to unearned, publicly generated land rent. What greater rent-seeker could there be than our banks who, by generating “super-profits” out of land price-inflated mortgages, have thereby leeched enormous amounts from the incomes of labour and capital?

• Bryan Kavanagh