Prosper Australia Feed Items

Tweaking individual policies will not deliver the change Australia needs: we must capture the consensus and commit to reforming our tax system away from earned and onto unearned income.

Prosper’s Director of Research and Policy, Tim Helm, was interviewed by Cameron Murray for the Fresh Economic Thinking podcast on 9 November 2023.  Their conversation covered the relationship between the prices of land and housing, how to define and measure landbanking, incentives for landbanking, the relationship between landbanking and housing supply, and methodological issues in […]

Presentation to the Planning Institute of Australia’s Victorian Conference, October 13, 2023 Today I want to take you on a rapid intellectual journey, a therapeutic crash-course, to convince you all to stop worrying about housing affordability – and instead, to learn to love high land values. Land takes the gains… Riddle me this: When planners […]

Prosper Australia today welcomed the announcement that the Vacant Residential Land Tax (VRLT) will be expanded to include suburban undeveloped and regional sites.

Victoria's new Housing Partnership shows a lot of promise. The devil will be in the detail. Prosper Australia unpacks the issues.

132nd Henry George Address by Professor Ross Garnaut Australia: Made for Free Trade and a Tax on Rent (Transcript of speech recorded at the Kelvin Club, Melbourne, 7 September 2023. Lightly edited for clarity and brevity.) Thanks, Tim, and very good to be here with this group of people. Very good to know that such […]

Waleed Aly Wins E.J. Craigie Writing Award for best article reflecting the ideas of Henry George as a social and economic reformer.

If we’re going to have to rethink our tax system, rent-seeking seems a good place to start. Perhaps if we taxed productive profit less than its unproductive counterpart, we’d have the seedlings of a system better designed to meet what the Intergenerational Report warns us is coming.

Prosper Australia welcomes Inquiry attention to Stamp Duty to Land Tax transition Prosper Australia today commended the Victorian Legislative Council’s Inquiry into Land transfer duty fees for their careful attention to the difficult issues involved in transitioning from stamp duty to a land tax. Prosper Australia Director of Research and Policy, Tim Helm, says: “We […]

Legislative Council Legal and Social Issues Committee 7 July 2023 Thank you for the opportunity to submit to the Legal and Social Issues Committee’s inquiry into rental and housing affordability. Prosper Australia is an independent research institute formed over 100 years ago to further public knowledge of the teachings and principles of economist and land […]

Planning deregulation, especially rezoning, has been repeatedly touted as a key policy solution to Australia’s eye watering house prices. The story goes that prices remain high because the supply of new dwellings in accessible, desirable locations has not kept pace with demand due to zoning restrictions. Rezoning for higher uses will increase supply and make […]

by Jehan Azad & Uri Bram Wired Magazine (published May 4, 2023). Reprinted with permission. “There’s no such thing as a good landlord” is a rallying cry of angry renters. In the future, it might be conventional morality that it’s simply wrong to own land. In our times, owning land seems as natural as owning […]

My belief is that Community Land Trusts (CLTs) can demonstrate the benefits of recycling land rents for the common good. This will support the larger Georgist agenda with a micro version of the macro vision. It’s been 12 months since we started Grounded Community Land Trust advocacy. Our job is to support the CLT movement […]