In 1971, Australia’s total land prices were $25.8 billion. They cracked the one trillion mark in 1998 when they hit $1.0173 trillion. They’ve grown rapidy since then, reaching $10.3736 trillion in 30 June this year (2025).

As land prices are simply the private capitalisation of publicly-generated land rents, they’re most inflationary. The average annual increase since 1971 has been 12.1%. This not only devalues the Australian dollar but makes mockery of the concocted ‘Consumer Price Inflation’ (CPI) as a measure of inflation.

Here’s a chart of the annual change in Australian land prices. It doesn’t show the increase in land prices to 30 June 2025 to be more than 400 times the 1971 figure.

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Sources for the data: Dr Terry Dwyer, “The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources” in Australian Tax Forum, Volume 18 Number 1, 2003 (1971 to 1983); the Commonwealth Grants Commission (1984 to 1988); thence (1989 to 2025) the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 5204.061).