“The Bureau of Statistics says Tasmanian dwelling approvals in May fell by 12.1 per cent, in seasonally adjusted terms.”

“The Housing Industry Association’s Stuart Clues says there has been no good news for the industry for months.”

“The Premier, Lara Giddings, says her Government has maintained significant land tax cuts which inject about $30 million back into the economy each year.” [!!!]

[Sigh!]

…. “IT WAS THE CARBON TAX AND THE LABOR PARTY THAT CAUSED THE DEPRESSION IN AUSTRALIA!”

When, of course, it was Australia’s household debt invested in bubble-inflated mortgages.

And both the Liberal and Labor parties are EQUALLY responsible for that mess!

[GUESS WHY AUSTRALIA HAD A RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE BUBBLE?]

SIGH!

Direct bank bailouts instead of loans, Angela?  Twenty more years of arrant nonsense?

Sometimes you’ve just got to put an end to it.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive. – Sir Walter Scott

Although no political party other than the Australian Democrats and the Republican Party of Australia promote capture of publicly-generated land rent in their policies by way of land tax (the Australian Labor Party having written, but never voted, it out of the party platform), fortunately the major parties still seem to accept the need for an ad-valorem charge on real estate at local and state government levels.

The extreme right is quite different, however.  It doesn’t accept the principle that land and resource rents are owed, equally, back to all the nation’s inhabitants.  Ayn Rand is their god, and in their eyes economic rent belongs to individuals. ‘Royal libertarians’ still seem to be in Rand’s thrall.

And thus it has been that a healthy suspicion of government has been replaced by a mindless call of the right to privatise all those natural monopolies once understood should necessarily be controlled by government.

In the state of Victoria we’ve seen the supply of gas and electricity privatised, the metropolitan rail network privatised, and our freeways turned into private tollroads – the latter reversing the age-old English dictum of the freedom of the highways and byways.

Ironically, the hard economic times brought about by the failure to capture Victoria’s rents in the late 1980s boom made the public asset sell-off all the easier in the recession of the early 1990s. The legislation was able to be passed by the forces of the extreme right on the proposition Victorians had no real entitlement to retain these natural monopolies when they were so eminently saleable in the recession. (They were obviously undersold in the recession.)

In a tribute to this Ayn Randian neo-liberalism, Victoria has now had more of its public infrastructure sold off to big private rent-seekers than any other state – and we’re beginning to witness the devastating effects.

As with the privatisation of Australia’s privately-constructed once publicly-owned telephone network, there is little doubt these state privatisations are not working: under the questionable guise the ‘user pays (twice)’, they’re coming at far too great a cost to the public.

It’s almost certain Melbourne’s trains would be running supremely better under public ownership than the procession of private companies which have endeavoured to run them; that tollways have been responsible for poorer people being unable to use their major highways to the extent they’d like to be able to; that the supply and maintenance of gas and electricity are not up to the standard when these utilities were in the hands of the public.

Private ownership of natural monopolies will never work satisfactorily, full stop. [Thoughts of US Enron fraud loom large!]

AN ULTIMATE EXAMPLE?

Properly engineered embankments would certainly not have provided the outrageous sight of the Morwell River recently disappearing into Tru Energy’s brown coal mine.  [Want an ironic laugh?]

Whilst the Victorian Labor opposition is quite correct in calling for an inquiry into the incident, and federal Democratic Labor Party Senator John Madigan is to be commended for bringing the matter up in the Senate on Tuesday night—and warning New South Wales and Queensland governments against going down the same path as Victoria in selling off their electricity generators—the real hope of the side for Victoria is to reverse these privatisations at such extreme breaches of care, and otherwise as the opportunity arises.

Melbourne 2012 Speculative Vacancies Report

There are 90,700 vacant houses in Melbourne – 5.9 per cent of the total – according to Earthsharing Australia’s 5th annual Speculative Vacancies Report released last night by researcher, Philip Soos.

“Our lazy land use makes a mockery of the drive for affordable housing,” Soos said.

Vacancy hotspots include: Docklands 14.1%, Williams Landing 13.5% and Truganina 12.9% where construction has clearly outstripped demand; and a wide swathe of western suburbs with vacancies around 10%.

“The eye opener is that the latest REIV vacancy of 2.3% must be added to these findings. Politicians should be concerned that a 10.1% unemployment rate for our most precious resource exists in the CBD. Idle land leads to idle labour.

“The Earthsharing survey measures actual activity based on water consumption. It reveals widespread vacancies, despite the strenuous efforts of the real estate industry to convince us otherwise.

“The REIV rental vacancy statistics on which the media and public rely are fragmented, incomplete and contain a significant downward bias. They do not include properties held by speculators. They do not include properties being drip fed to the market in ‘staged releases’. They are misleading and should be condemned.

“Would it be ethical for your local pharmacist to drip feed life saving cancer drugs to the market at progressively higher prices? Would it be acceptable to do this against a fabricated background of drug shortages? The national outcry would end this immediately.

“First home buyers and renters are being deceived. In an affordability crisis, they deserve better information on which to make the biggest financial decision of their lives.

“Reporting artificially-lowered vacancy rates hoodwinks renters into accepting rent increases, prompts over-investment in property, and cows government into adopting policies agreeable to the real estate industry.

“Our survey tells a different story. Australia has one of the most generous residential property taxation regimes in the world. Capital appreciation has dwarfed rental income for years. Withholding properties from the market is a rational investor strategy.

The National Housing Supply Council claims a 228,000 housing shortage nationwide. We say there is nearly half that locked up here in Melbourne, Soos said.

“Given the towering value of the land market and its central role in all human activity, government is remarkably apathetic about investigating its workings, preferring to further expand the urban growth boundary to enrich land bankers.

“High quality statistics are possible in the information age at relatively little cost. If a little NGO like Earthsharing can do it, why not the Victorian and federal governments?

The importance of accurate housing vacancy information is of heightened concern as we see California, Ireland and now Spain bulldozing houses in regions that were reported to have property shortages before their housing bubble burst.”

Download the Speculative Vacancies in Melbourne Report 2012

Media contact for Philip Soos: David Collyer: news@prosper.org.au

How would you like to be stolen from everyday?  In large amounts?

You are already.

One way or another, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) does this to you on a daily basis, either on your income, your purchases – or both.

“Oh, that doesn’t count!”

Of course it counts!

The ATO doesn’t NEED to take your money in this manner. It IS theft!  You have absolutely no duty to be a cash cow for the ATO or the 0.1%.

It’s NOT your public duty, because there is a better ALTERNATIVE – a surplus fund that OUGHT to be tapped for revenue, whereby you’d pay only what you SHOULD pay into the public coffers.

That’s the land rent fund.  It arises when any community comes together.

It’s currently stands about $400,000 billion in Australia–30% of our GDP–and is therefore capable of replacing all taxation at the three levels of government, and then having some left over!

Each of us would pay on the basis of the annual value of the land over which we hold title.  It is a continuing charge for exclusive possession of our land, and, if we only have one parcel of land, all wage earners in the family will contribute to this revenue charge.

Fair?

Absent taxation and its deadweight, prices of goods and services would fall across Australia.  We would become the most cost-competitive nation on the face of the earth; even better than China or India.  Difficult (or impossible) to believe?

It gets better.

If we ALSO capture the FULL market rents of the minerals, spectra, fishing and forestry licenses we grant, we’d be able to pay an enormous social dividend equally to every Australian citizen, as a universal basic income.

Here is true FREE enterprise!

Isn’t this better than being stolen from by the parasitical leeches who currently steal most of our land and natural resource rents?  (That’s WHY we are currently OBLIGED to pay taxation on our comings and goings!)

You don’t think it can be done because the political parties and the public don’t get it?

Tell them about it; make them get it.  Insist we capture our rents – and let’s put the ATO out of business.

We have a current site value assessed at local government level on every property in Australia.  Let them collect it via salary deduction, or in any other manner agreed.  Local governments can keep their part of the revenue, then pass the balance up the line, to the States and the federal government.

The world is having this financial collapse because we’ve failed to capture our public rents.  Doing so, and freeing labour and capital from taxation, will turn the economic depression around overnight for any country undertaking the capture of its land and resource rents.

It’s time to go for it.

The motto? “Pay the Rent!”

[That is, the WHOLE rent, and nothing but the rent.]