When not one Australian politician is today prepared to say what our longest-serving Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies, said (above) just before the Great Depression, we have a major problem.

Land prices are the private capitalisation of publicly generated land rent, and the national accounts (ABS Catalogue 5204 Table 61) shows that they have exploded to more than $10 trillion dollars, representing $375,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia.

We clearly need to be capturing more land rent publicly.

Where’s the politician who correctly sees land prices as the fundamental driver of inflation and entirely antithetical to productivity (eh, Productivity Commission)?

Are they silent on it because most of them are, like many Australians, commodifying land, ‘investing’, for their own retirement? The practice of Australians pumping land prices more than any other nation presents a grave threat to the country.

Poliricians self-justification: “Wouldn’t speaking out on the pumping of land values offend many people, and banking, real estate and media interests who leverage off property speculation? We can’t do that!“

So, onward we roll, into the next financial depression, as our gigantic bubble in land prices bursts.