It was far from being a state of bliss, but Australia experienced a pretty good socio-economic period in the post-WWII years of the Kondratieff Wave which led up to its peak in 1973.

It’s been slowly but relentlessly downhill towards the 2025/26 depressionary trough ever since.

Many Australians blamed the 1974/75 economic bust on Gough Whitlam, so Malcolm Fraser seized the opportunity to have the Governor-General dismiss the Whitlam Government. Despite the political brouhaha, the electorate voted the Fraser Government into power.

A lot of people noted that the downturn at the time was worldwide, so it clearly wasn’t simply a matter of the Whitlam government’s spending. People came to blame the OPEC crisis for the economic recession instead.

In doing so, they airbrushed the world’s greatest real estate bubble out of history.

The Fraser Government was removed from office at the 1982/83 recession following the bursting of the 1981 real estate bubble.

With the blessing of a tax regime rewarding extractive real estate speculation at the expense of productivity, the process has continued and worsened – with the assistance of the RBA and governments of both persuasions: the 1988/89 land price bubble, the 2007 bubble/GFC and now the likely 2025/26 biggie ……

Aren’t we more than a little silly putting up with tax regimes which reward banking excesses, monopoly and spec?

It’s NOT going to end well as the post-WWII fourth depressionary Kondratieff Wave has its final way with us.

The un-taxing of labour and capital would address the ‘baked-in’ inflationary deadweight losses from taxation in the price of every good and service for which we have to pay. Inflation is not simply “excess money”, nor “excess demand”. It’s more fundamental than that: it’s the direct result of failing to tax ground rent away and taxing doers instead.

Lets trust we can reverse the rent-grabbing that was made much easier by neoclassical economists when the Great Depression struck?