All posts by Bryan Kavanagh

I'm a real estate valuer who worked in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) before co-founding Westlink Consulting, a real estate valuation practice. I discovered, by leaving publicly-generated land rents to be privately capitalised by banks and individuals into escalating land price bubbles, this generates repetitive recessions and financial depressions. We need a tax-switch: from wages, profits and commodities onto economic rents/unearned incomes, if we are to create prosperity and minimise excessive private debt.

ELON’S MISSION

1. Mars

2. Wage fraud and abuse.

In what way is that likely to deal with the major generators of inflation, poverty and crime? i.e. Arbitrary taxes on incomes and purchases?

HENRY GEORGE’S MISSION

Un-tax purchases and earned incomes

Public capture of the publicly geneated land rent over which people have been provided title, to deliver: –

Free land (on the annual payment of its rent), free education, free health care, free public transport and a citizens’ dividend to all.

But Elon Musk and Donald Trump have the whip hand, so onward we proceed, into the financial depression: –

FUNDING THE EAST COAST HIGH SPEED RAIL

AN OVERARCHING APPROACH                                                                                    

We need to acknowledge that ALL beneficiaries of the much-needed Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney-Brisbane high-speed rail (HSR) should pay towards its construction, not just the relatively few unlucky people who happen to be located near the rail line, or in any new town close to the railway.

Therefore, this should not only include people in the cities of Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, but also in the whole of Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), New South Wales and Queensland who would also be served by the new HSR as a most valuable alternative to existing airline and ‘slow’ rail travel.

There is, say, 1800 kilometres of rail @ $100,000,000 per kilometre. So, we have an estimated cost of AUD$180,000,000,000 which includes the rail line and high-speed trainsets. This is more than generous in relation to international parameters.

It should be noted that the value of existing rail and airline services are currently reflected to varying degrees in the current land values of these states and the ACT at 30 June 2024, as displayed in the national accounts (ABS Catalogue 5204, Table 61), namely: –

NSW     $3758.9 billion

Vic         $2468.1 billion

Qld        $1723.7 billion

ACT       $   145.6 billion

Total     $8096.3 billion (i.e. $8.096 trillion)

These land values will have a tendency to increase year by year in any event. However, the announcement of the HSR project will have further immediate impact on increasing property values, dependent upon each property’s location as assessed by local real estate markets.

Assuming recovery of the $180 billion cost over a period of twenty years, this notionally represents an amount of $9 billion a year.

The aforementioned land values will increase anyway–such that future rates in the dollar should decline—so the rate to be struck now would only be about 1/10th of a cent in the dollar! Actually, $0.0011 x $8,096,300,000,000 = $8.9 billion pa. 

Clearly, this method of ‘value capture’ is the fairest, cheapest and most efficient approach to fund the proposed HSR. It obviously requires cooperation between Australian federal, state and local governments in connection with existing municipal valuations.

– Bryan Kavanagh

THE THUCYDIDES TRAP

  1. House prices become impossible for plebians.
  2. Workers are overly indebted to finance and a land-grabbing aristocracy.*
  3. Social division is apparent and internal collapse is imminent.
  4. Financial depression occurs.
  5. “That emerging nation has become too powerful. It threatens us!”
  6. Trade wars commence.
  7. War between two major powers is seen to be a convenient response to problems at home and abroad. (“We need a good war!”)

Wars are land grabs.

The bells are ringing.

*The private rent seeking from which we’ve proven unable to extract ourselves has occasioned repetitive human disasters.

Taxes on incomes and purchases are deeply pathological. So, the health of nations is determined by whether they prove able to capture the rent of their land and natural resources publicly.

*The aristocracy and its supporters have always resisted this salubrious outcome. They prefer war.

REMAINING MISGUIDED

Applying a land rent charge instead of paying the enormous array of taxes we do won’t come easily, because people erroneously believe their best interests are served by land prices continuing to increase.

We cling to destructive taxes on incomes and purchases as we complain regularly on radio [hello, 3AW!] about the level of our land ‘tax’–it’s actually a rent that can’t be passed off in prices as taxes are–without comprehending the societal distress that land prices and taxes are causing.

So, we compete with each other to own as much real estate as we can to ‘secure our future’ at a great cost to others.