I was a guest on Ian McNamara’s “Australia All Over” in the ABC’s new Melbourne studios in 1997.

In his show today, he read out an email I sent him last week about the terrible floods in Queensland and New South Wales :-

“You might remember I was a valuer who worked in the Australian Taxation Office and the Commonwealth Bank before co-founding a valuation practice in Melbourne.

Macca, Australia would have been much better prepared against fire and flood if we had great civil engineers like John Bradfield and Sir Ronald East around.

Ronald East had a role in Australian post-war reconstruction, arguing that flood abatement infrastructure paid for itself by generating jobs. It also raised the land values which we taxed more in those days than people’s wages.

We should thank our forebears that they just got on with building highways, railways, dams, schools and hospitals without today’s neoliberal nonsense: ‘Where’s the money to come from?’

As we tax labour and capital to a standstill, maybe we need to see the money should be coming from taxing land values, as in the days of Bradfield and East.

We’re missing essential infrastructure because we’re too busy pumping land prices to the moon”, says Bryan Kavanagh.