– Part 4
1901 - 1919
Federation & Single Tax Movement
Foundation of the Australian Tax Office
Origin of Reserve Bank of Australia
The State of Victoria Adopts Site Value Rating
TAXING WAGES …WAS A ‘TEMPORARY’ WARTIME MEASURE! Remember?
– Part 5
Unnecessary Wars
Income tax introduced to fund World War I
Australia, from the 1920s
1930s - 1960s: Religion in Australian politics
Quadragesimo Anno (1931)
"The Menzies Era" 1949 to 1966
ASIO: I, SPRY- The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy
– Part 6
1970s - 1990s
It's Time! The Legendary 1972 Election Campaign
1986: Independence for Australia
How Labor Lost its Way
REVIEW - Looking Back
Remembering the Whitlam Era
– Part 7
2007: Unlocking the Riches of Oz
2008: Wayne Swan 'discovers' the real estate market
2010: Australian Treasury Department tax review
2011: CHOGM: Flashback to colonialism
2012: A Big Mistake: Deputy PM Julia Gillard's Big Opportunity
The Kavanagh-Putland Index
Tax Havens: The Tax Justice Network
– Part 8
The Honourable Paul Keating spoke out in 2011
"The whole of the people have the right of the ownership of land and the right to share in the value of land itself, though not to share in the fruits of land which properly belong to the individuals
by whose labour they are produced." — Alfred Deakin (1856-1919), Prime Minister of Australia, 1903-1910.
Timeline: Australian Prime Ministers
Part 1 Introduction
Australia is a member of the British Commonwealth, following the Westminster system of government and law.
Where did the name 'Australia' come from? National Library of Australia For many centuries Europeans believed there must be a vast land in the southern hemisphere, variously called ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ or ‘Unknown South Land’. After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as ‘New Holland’. English explorer Matthew Flinders circumnavigate the continent in 1803, and used the name ‘Australia’ to describe the continent on a hand drawn map in 1804. ... When the map and book describing his journey was finally published in 1814 the name 'Terra Australis' was used... view his General chart of Terra Australis or Australia map online. >>>more
'Australia' became a British Penal Colony following the arrival, on 24 January 1788, of the First Fleet of 11 ships from England, transporting 1480 men, women and children, including Irish, Scottish, English, French, African, and American 'convicts'.
"Transportation" to Australia from the British Isles and Ireland began after England lost landing rights and control over plantations in North America with the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776) and the Treaty of Paris (1783). The majority of those people transported as convicts were disinherited, impoverished people by whose “hard labour” colonial infrastructure was laid down in preparation for the arrival of “free settlers”.
"The unfortunate English sociopath Edward Gibbon Wakefield, espoused that new settlements required neither slaves nor convicts for cheap labour; a compliant workforce may be had simply by selling land at ‘sufficient price’ that only the wealthy would be able to afford it. Wakefield had stumbled upon the high-land price, high-taxing formula that Pliny the Elder said had been the ruin of Ancient Rome: 'The great landed estates destroyed Italy' (Latifundia perdidere Italiam). It is this selfsame socially damaging regime into which at the outset of the 21st century world economies have morphed." – Kavanagh, B., (2007), Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A Case Study of the Social and Economic Costs of Australian Real Estate Bubbles, 1972-2006 (pdf).
On 1 January 1901, The Commonwealth of Australia became an independent sovereign nation: a federation of states and territories– independent politically and economically. Australia's Founding Fathers were aware that land and resource monopoly could be prevented by directing the flow of increased land values into the National Treasury when the Fisher Labour Government launched The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) in 1910, under laws specifically designed for collection of Economic Rent via a land tax.
(PDF: Federal land tax, archival document: Land Tax Act 1910)
(Details under Part 4).
There are two main political parties and a number of minor parties, which make up the Commonwealth Parliament.
- Each state and territory has its own government.
-
Voting is compulsary under the Preferential Voting system.
Australia had a federal land tax from 1910 to 1952. When Liberal Party Prime Minister Sir Robert Gordon Menzies removed the federal land tax in 1952, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Arthur Calwell, attacked the decision in a 33 minute parliamentary speech on 24 February 1953:“We of the Australian Labour Party have always believed that the land is the patrimony of the people, and that nobody has a complete and absolute title to it …. The land belongs to the people, and its use must be safeguarded and protected at all times …. We have always believed in the land tax, and when happy days come again we shall restore the measure, imposing the tax to the statute book of this country...” The federal land tax was abolished by the Land Tax Abolition Act 1953.
A modified land tax, via a 99-year Crown lease, is still applied in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), while the Victorian Government passed the Land Tax Act 1958 (Vic) on assessing the unimproved value of land.
Excerpt:
One reason why fiscal federalism is so important to this review is that, notwithstanding the fact that the well-being of taxpayers is affected by the entire federation's tax-transfer system, past tax reviews tended to focus on improving the taxes only of the government that commissioned the review(1).
...
An integrated tax-transfer system for our federation
...
As part of its enquiry, the panel is assessing how different taxes and transfers rate against the standard policy assessment criteria – fairness, efficiency, simplicity, sustainability and coherence. These criteria will enable us to identify taxes which should be levied, taxes that are so irredeemingly poor that they should be abolished, and taxes that are reformable – the good, the bad and the ugly. ... designing an improved tax-transfer system for the federation is not enough. The Panel is also aware that the implementation and maintenance of a package of reforms is a difficult task in our federation. A new intergovernmental agreement (IGA) would be necessary... while a whole-of-federation approach is a big challenge, and one which has not been seriously attempted before – the chance to take such an approach gives the review panel an unprecedented opportunity to influence tax-transfer policy across the whole of Australia and its governments. This is not an opportunity that any of us can afford to waste. Thank you.
"Our valuations are updated and accurate ('highest and best use') assessment is produced once every two years by each municipality, and each State relies on this municipal valuation. The ideal would be to assess the actual land rental, rather than striking a rate in the dollar on the site's capital value, but that's a long way off here in Oz."
– Bryan Kavanagh, Australian Taxation Office Land Valuer (Ret.)
The Boundaries of Australian Property Law “…concept, theory and practical aspects of property law in Australia in areas such as easements, restrictive covenants, leases, housing, native title and mortgages.” – Hossein Esmaeili and Brendan Grigg, 2016,
CUP [Google Books scan]
Abstract
The Boundaries of Australian Property Law offers a unique perspective on real property law in Australia. As the overwhelming majority of land interests in Australia now fall under the Torrens title system, this book's particular focus on the development and operation of the Torrens system in Australia is both timely and welcome. Addressing the prescribed Priestly 11 requirements for a property law subject in Australia, this informative and academically rigorous book includes carefully selected statutory material and case law from all Australian jurisdictions, as well as the United Kingdom. The general law system is also discussed and referred to where necessary, to give context and depth to the analysis of real property law. Written by prominent real property law academics from law schools around Australia, and edited by Hossein Esmaeili and Brendan Grigg, this text is a modern and much-needed addition to real property law literature.
See the full 1921 speech HERE, with more details to follow below, under Part 5
"There is increased interest in land taxation in Australia and internationally, as reflected for example, in the Henry report on tax reform in 2010...." (Ingles, 2016)
"Tax reform is in the news daily. Calls for fundamental reform have become louder, but there are diverse views on the direction and scope of the reform that is needed. . . the Henry Review (Report on Australia’s Future Tax System, Henry 2010a) made a detailed examination of Australia’s tax and transfer system. . . Tax reform is fundamentally political. Rather than recommending specific reforms, we aim to identify key principles and directions for tax reform and to show what we know, and where the gaps are in our knowledge of tax policy."
This TTPI report:
> reviews the economic and social challenges which the Henry Review identified and identifies new ones which have come to the fore in the last five years;
> provides an overview of the tax and transfer system and changes since the Henry Review, including comparisons with selected countries;
> identifies principles for analysis and discusses some of the broad choices and trade-offs that will need to be considered in any reform;
> assesses the extent to which the Henry Review continues to provide a basis for considering the direction of tax and transfer system reform; and
> identifies areas that warrant further consideration and research.
– Stewart et al. 2015
Abstract There is increased interest in land taxation in Australia and internationally, as reflected for example, in the "Henry Review" on tax reform in 2010 and the UK Mirrlees Report in 2011. This interest stems from the immobility of land as a factor of production, which stands in contrast to other factors such as capital and labour. Logically, immobile factors can be taxed more heavily and with less efficiency cost than mobile ones. The interest in land taxation revisits the work of the 19th century reformer Henry George but in fact has antecedents going back to Ricardo and before. By making land more expensive to own, we can (somewhat paradoxically) make it cheaper to buy. At the extreme a 100 per cent tax on land rent reduces the capital value to the annual rental value; that is, to around 3-5 per cent of the untaxed value. A 5 per cent tax reduces the capital value of land by half, and a 1 per cent tax reduces it by 17 per cent. However the lump-sum nature of land taxes – and their high visibility to taxpayers – makes them politically very difficult to raise. The theoretical revenue available, which is one-third to one half of all Commonwealth tax revenue, may be practically unavailable.
Comments on the above abstract.
1. "...expensive to own, we can (somewhat paradoxically) make it cheaper to buy."
~ The land would be less difficult to buy, e.g. no deposit or bank loan with interest or stamp duty required, and a home would be affordable to lease. Location, location, is key.
2. "However the lump-sum nature of land taxes..."
~ As Milton Friedman and others have recommended, if you wanted to reduce the burden of the lump-sum annual land tax, 'the way to do it would simply be to provide for an effective method whereby it could be withheld at source, in small payments and that would eliminate a large part of the objection to it'.
3. "...their high visibility to taxpayers – makes them politically very difficult to raise."
~ All taxes are difficult to raise. Good government leads. A major 'tax-shift' needs to be clearly explained: That economic rent theorem represents a self-supporting system 'flow'; cycling of 'user-fees' or economic/resource rent into the community has rewards in equitable shares of surplus which enhances or maintains rather than degrades or destroys society (shades of Alfred Deakin).
4. "The theoretical revenue available, which is one-third to one half of all Commonwealth tax revenue, may be practically unavailable."
~ This conclusion isn't based on empirical evidence. "Revenue available" does not represent a revenue stream. It is a surplus, representing effective fiscal management. After outlays and expenditures, surpluses can be shared as dividends, aka "Citizen Dividends".
Follow the TTPI Blog:
Austaxpolicy, the blog of the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy,
ANU, Canberra, ACT
S O L D ... not quite.
All land in the ACT is leasehold,
so it's the lease that's been sold, not the land. . .
If you're buying a property in Canberra, you're not actually purchasing the land, instead you're buying into a 99-year Crown lease.
. . . prominent local barrister Chris Erskine S.C. He has an interest in the history of the city and has written about the Territory's 99-year leases.
Chris pointed me in the direction of a once influential American.
Canberra's leasehold system was based on a bold social experiment that originated with Henry George, an American social philosopher of the late 1800s.
In the late 19th Century, politicians from all persuasions listened to what he had to say.
George's central idea was that as a city develops the value of its land goes up.
He asked whether it was reasonable for the landholder to claim the increased value of the land, the "unearned increment", when the landholder in most cases hadn't done anything to cause the increase in value. >>>more
During a January 2012 lecture series on philosophy and economics, Australian economist Dr John Tippett debated questions amplified in A Philosophers Take on Economics (2012):
Science explains and understands the world of matter; philosophy explains and understands the world of spirit. Economics is the meeting place of these two worlds.
Whilst the immediate concern of economics is policy in the 'world of matter', the key participant in economic life is the human being, whose ultimate purpose of participation is to do with the 'world of spirit'. Hence economics meets these two realms, stands at their interface. Its task is to ensure the rule of justice.
– What are the implications of the global financial crisis on current thinking and living?
– Have recent events been fair and just?
– How may we live together in communities in prosperity, unfettered by the strictures of necessity?
– Have we been set free by the economic activity of the past 20 years? – Dr John Tippett, 2012
1776
The signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776 forced Britain to find a new penal colony:
"Transportation" to Australia from the British Isles and Ireland began after England lost landing rights and control over plantations in North America. The majority of 'transportees', were from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, by whose “hard labour” colonial infrastructure was laid down in preparation for the arrival of “free settlers”.
Lecture excerpt: When Captain Arthur Phillip, with his band of colonists one thousand or more strong, established the first settlement on Australian soil at Sydney Cove in 1788 the title to all the east coast of the continent from the 135th meridian of longitude became vested in the Crown.
Sir Francis Forbes, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, said in 1834:
"It is a matter of history that New South Wales was taken possession of, in the name of the King of Great Britain, about fifty-five years ago. This Court is bound to know judicially, that an Act of Parliament passed in the 27th year of King George the Third (cap.2), enabling His Majesty to institute a colony and civil government on the east side of New South Wales. The right of the soil, and of all lands in the Colony, became vested immediately upon its settlement, in His Majesty, in right of his Crown, and as the representative of the British Nation. His Majesty by his prerogatives is enabled to dispose of the lands so vested in the Crown. It is part of the law of England that the prerogatives can only be exercised in a certain definite and legal manner. His Majesty can only alienate Crown lands by means of a record — that is by a grant, by letters patent, duly passed under the Great Seal of the Colony, according to law, and in conformity with his Majesty’s instructions to the Governor"
– King v Steel: Legge’s Report, 1834, pp. 68-69.
Charles Joseph La Trobe CB (1801-1875) was appointed superintendent of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales in 1839, population 10,000. After the establishment in 1851 of the colony of Victoria, he became its first lieutenant-governor (1851-1854) during what was one of the largest movements of people the modern world had ever seen. Soon after Victoria’s ‘separation’, the discovery of gold in several locations across the state led to a mass exodus of the population of Melbourne to the gold fields. >>> more
Charles Hotham (1806-1855), became Victoria’s second Lieutenant -Governor in 1854, and in the same year, Victorian gold miners united to protect their rights. The resulting battle was the Eureka Stockade: Australia's most famous rebellion. On 19 November 1854, six months after his arrival in Melbourne, Hotham appointed a Royal Commission on goldfields problems and grievances. In the lead up to the Eureka Stockade, Hotham enforced mining licensing laws and sent 450 soldiers and police to Ballarat to oversee ’fee’ collection. >>> more
Eureka Stockade
The Eureka Stockade was caused by disagreements over what gold miners felt were unfair laws and policing of their work by government. Miners were unable to claim the land on which they worked, and so risked being relocated at a moment's notice.
Architecture & infrastructure
La Trobe struggled with overcrowding but managed to lay the foundations of a modern "garden" city.
Transport
In the early days of the gold rushes, getting to the goldfields was a matter of walking, going on horseback or buying a place on a bullock dray.
Conditions
Life was incredibly hard for diggers. Many even described the gold fields as a graveyard - each man digging his own grave.
The Victoria Day Council acknowledges the Traditional Owners of land wherever we meet. We pay our respects to Elders, past and present and commit ourselves to reconciliation between all people in the State of Victoria, and in the Commonwealth of Australia.
1850
Commemoration of the establishment of
the State of Victoria in September 1850. Transcript Separation Tree Sapling
This tree is a sapling of the Separation Tree
from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne.
The Separation Tree, now dead, was a four hundred year old red gum
that had provided shade at an aboriginal corrobboree ground
when on 15 November 1850 the existing
Superintendent of Port Phillip District, Charles Latrobe
gathered the entire Melbourne community together (over 10,000).
It was here he announced the House of Commons in London
had passed the Australian Colonies Act
and that on 1 July 1851, Victoria would be founded
as a separate state from New South Wales.
It would have its own parliament, municipal authorities,
judiciary, police force and taxation.
This day was a public holiday in Victoria celebrating Victoria’s foundation from 1851 till 1916 when it was ended due to the First World War.
Victoria Day Council provided this tree sapling to Council.
The majority of "early settlers" in Australia were political escapees, and refugees from Ireland's "rack-rent" land tenure system, aka The Ulster Custom, (annual auctioning of farming lands to the highest bidder), with numbers escalated by the mid-1800s Irish famine.
(Recommended reading:
8 ESSAYS: The Great Irish Famine
by James V. Mullin, author of The Great Irish Famine Curriculum.
Remembering the Great Irish Famine – 1845-1852
An Gorta Mór – aka The Great Hunger, Irish Potato Famine, and Irish Genocide. The 1841 census showed the Irish population at 8,175,124.
40 years later, the 1881 census showed the population had fallen by 37% - over 3 million, to 5,174,836. The Irish population continued to fall to 4,228,553 by 1926.
"Almost 4000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. . .
– Christine Kinealy, ‘A Death-Dealing Famine’:
The Great Hunger in Ireland,1997, University of Chicago Press, pp. 32-36.
See preview on Google Books
and, “. . . As the Famine progressed, it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland. These included population control and the consolidation of property through various means, including emigration”
– Christine Kinealy, The Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52, 1994, p. 352
See preview on Google Books
The Irish in Australia,"a group of secondary importance" –
The role played by the Irish in the late 1800s establishment of US industrial society is well documented, while accounts of Irish contributions in Australia were few and far between, until ANU scholar Gregory Michael Tobin met the challenge with his 1969 MA Thesis, The Sea-Divided Gael: a study of the Irish Home Rule Movement in Victoria and New South Wales, 1880-1916 (pdf)
Excerpt:
Although the Irish constitute one of the major formative influences in the development of Australian society, they have as yet escaped the serious attention of historians. No coherent body of literature exists to place the Irish in their colonial context and assess the distinctiveness of their contribution to an emerging Australian ethos; yet this is not to say that the Irish have been totally ignored by local, researchers - rather, they have been seen as a group of secondary importance, often to be found on the periphery of large and significant events or embroiled in violent
controversy. Accordingly, we have studies of the Irish and Eureka, the Irish and the Labour Party, the Irish and conscription - but never of the Irish in their own right, as a distinct ethnic group coming to terms with a difficult and often hostile environment. (p. i )
. . . The rise of Parnell was to be one of the major developments during 1880, but there was one other element which was to add further complexity to the picture,
While Parnell was establishing his authority over the Parliamentary Party, a second front was being opened up in Ireland itself. The founding of the Irish Land League in 1879 triggered off a long campaign of agrarian agitation designed to produce direct and immediate solutions to the chronic problems confronting the Irish tenantry, high rents, uncertain returns, and the ever present threat of eviction. The driving force behind the League was the ex-Fenian, Michael Davitt, who had revived the old theory that a nationalist movement grounded in the desperate need of the peasantry would be far more likely to win freedom for Ireland than a purely constitutional agitation.1(p. 66)
Ref. 1.
Thirty years before, James Fintan Lalor (brother of Peter Lalor) had argued that it was essential to
“. . . link Repeal to some other question as a railway carriage to an engine; some question possessing the intrinsic strength which Repeal wants. . .” The one issue which met these requirements was the land issue: “. . . the land question contains, and the legislative question does not contain, the materials from which victory is manufactured".
– James Fintan Lalor, quoted in N.D. Palmer, The Irish Land League Crisis, (New Haven, 1940), p.108
Continuing:
A Note on Sources (p. 310)
There are no previous accounts of the Home Rule movement in the Australian context. The only major studies of the Irish influence in Australian history are of limited value to the modern reader: J. F. Hogan’s The Irish in Australia, Melbourne, 1888, does not throw very much light on the nationalist aspirations of the Irish colonists, and P. S. Cleary’s Australia’s debt to her Irish Nation builders, Sydney (1933), tended to concentrate on the evidence of Irish involvement in the affairs of their adopted country rather than on their interest in the homeland. As a result, the story of the Home Rule movement in Victoria and New South Wales must be pieced together largely from the Catholic weeklies, which are the only sources of detailed information. The Melbourne Advocate is the most useful, single source because its owner, Joseph Winter, was a key figure in the movement and used his paper as a platform for the nationalist viewpoint. The Freeman’s Journal in Sydney had less direct connection with the Home Rule movement, but gave constant coverage of local developments. (p. 310) >>> more
"Henry George had risen from obscurity by attacking absentee landlords generically, and Irish landlords specifically (Douglas, 1976: 15-59; Barker, 1955: 335-72). His 1881 tract on The Irish land Question (later retitled The land Question) is what had sparked initial interest in the more heavyweight Progress and Poverty. He was intimately involved in Irish politics, after travelling as a journalist to Ireland to report for The Irish World of New York, serving a New York clientele of Irish émigrés."
Michael Davitt - "The Father of the Irish National Land League."
Irish 'refugees' who had arrived in Australia as 'free settlers' would soon become aware of the 1879 launch of the Irish Land League, and the efforts of Michael Davitt (1846-1906), whose Catholic family were evicted tenant farmers, under the "Rack Rent" system, and Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891), a Protestant landowner and member of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Together they campaigned to reclaim the right to "fixed tenure and free sale" of land.
Bishop of Meath, Thomas Nulty
One of the Irish Land League's key supporters was Dr. Thomas Nulty (1816-1898), the Catholic Bishop of Meath, whose address to his diocese on the 'land question' is legendary:Back To The Land, (1881): "The system of land tenure in Ireland ... has created a state of human existence which in strict truth and justice can be characterized as the twin sister of slavery."
DEDICATION
To the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath:
Dearly Beloved Brethren,-
I venture to take the liberty of dedicating the following Essay to you, as a mark of my respect and affection. In this Essay I do not, of course, address myself to you as your Bishop, for I have no divine commission to enlighten you on your civil rights, or to instruct you in the principles of Land Tenure or Political Economy. I feel, however, a deep concern even in your temporal interests — deeper, indeed, than in my own; for what temporal interests can I have save those I must always feel in your welfare? It is, then, because the Land Question is one not merely of vital importance, but one of life and death to you, as well as to the majority of my countrymen, that I have ventured to write on it at all >>> more
Michael Davitt read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" (1879) four times before personally seeking George out in the US.
Davitt is reported to have said, in 1882,"If a copy of that book can be put in every workman's club and Land League and library in the three kingdoms the revolution will be made..."- Barry Sheppard, 2014
Michael Davitt, who went on to become a great orator and one of the most influential leaders of Ireland’s independence movement, is renowned as "The Father of the Irish National Land League".
"Australasia is, in fact, an industrial empire of unfederated Labour nations, where neither wars nor foreign policies intrude their demoralising influences upon the peaceful programmes and progress of domestic government. The people have the fullest and most effective control of their own affairs. There are no ruling classes. The Conservatism which shows itself in any organised form in the Legislatures has to be more democratic in its professions and programs than an opportunist English Liberalism dares yet to be. ..."
In Part III, Chapter XVI, Under Origins of the Labour Settlements, pp. 69-74: (from page 95 on archive.org), Davitt gives a detailed review of the Crown Lands Acts of 1893, which was designed to fund cooperative farming settlements with interest-free 3-year loans, extending to a further 10 years at 5% interest rate.
See dedicated history:
The Irish Land League and Michael DavittHERE
The Americans
“There is in nature no reason for poverty.”
—Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
The American Progressive Era, 1900-1920, was considered by many to be capitalism’s most productive and least corrupt period, when most taxes came from real estate values.
American influence:
"Understanding the past to prepare for the future... "During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Philadelphia helped give birth to The Single Tax Movement, one of the country’s more influential, if less well-remembered, reform movements. The idea of a 'single tax' on the unimproved value of land, rather than on productive activities, was popularized by Henry George (1839-97), a native of Philadelphia."
- Dr. Christopher England, Single Tax Movement (2017)
Australia's most influential source of international news, The Bulletin, inspired the gathering of talented contributors who, in 1880, established The Land Nationalisation League in Sydney, which was reformed in 1889 asThe Single Tax League, with E. W. Foxall as vice-president. Among the leading advocates was the legendary poet and writer John Farrell, whose 'Australia to England' [1897] was performed in song for the Federation inaugural celebrations.
At the first formal meeting, Percy Meggy, editor of a leading country daily, was called on to read a paper on "Municipal Taxation," then published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Sat. 3 Nov 1888, p. 10: Text available on TROVE
The international bestseller, Progress and Poverty (1879), written when Henry George was age 40, inspired public debate around the world and across Australia.
... Internationally, George's ideas had a profound effect upon figures as far-flung and diverse as Leo Tolstoy, Sun Yat Sen, and George Bernard Shaw, ....
One of the most perceptive assessments of Henry George's influence on several generations of American reformers comes from the historian Eric F. Goldman. Writing to a friend in 1954, two years after publishing Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform he recalled with wonder:
For some years prior to 1952, I was working on a history of American reform and over and over again my research ran into this fact:
an enormous number of men and women, strikingly different people, men and women who were to lead 20th century America in a dozen fields of humane activity, wrote or told someone that their whole thinking had been redirected by reading Progress and Poverty in their formative years. In this respect no other book came anywhere near comparable influence... – Eric F. Goldman, 1954
Excerpt:
‘Progress and Poverty’ was discussed, damned, praised, and analysed on all levels from the professorial to the political”. (Picard p 46)
According to Billy Hughes, Australia's 7th Prime Minister, 1915-1923:
“This was the hour of Australia’s great awakening . . .
Henry George with his panacea for all economic and social ills – the single tax – captured the imagination of thousands of young and ardent spirits. Single Tax leagues sprang up as if by magic and converts, fired by enthusiasm, went about like the early Christians preaching the gospel, and Multitudes heard them and enlisted under their banner.”– W.M. (Billy) Hughes, ‘Crusts and Crusades: Tales of bygone days' (1947) p. 60
... Alfred Deakin, thrice prime minister, who as early as 1882 declared himself “a declared Georgist”;
Another was (Sir) Samuel Griffith, premier and chief justice of Queensland and founding high court justice. In the Labor party, apart from Billy Hughes, were Andrew Fisher, the second Labor prime minister; George Pearce, the long-serving defence minister; and William Holman, a premier of NSW.
“It is the opinion of this Congress, that a simple yet sovereign remedy which will raise wages, increase and give remunerative employment, abolish poverty, extirpate pauperism, lessen crime, elevate moral taste and intelligence, purify government, and carry civilisation to a yet nobler height, is to abolish all taxation save that on land values.”
By the middle of the 1880s the political system that had dominated all Australian colonies since self government in the mid 1850s was breaking down, though what would replace it was not clear. That system had revolved everywhere around domination by a political elite – a mixture of landowners in the upper houses and middle class professionals and business men in the lower. Excluded from politics were women, Aborigines, and virtually all the labouring or working classes and what has been called broadly “the democracy”. Georgism was part of the movement that gave these new classes their identity and representation. What exactly was the form and shape of that broad movement requires further detailed historical work, but it is clear that the influence of Georgism was seminal.
…
As Farrell later said of those times: “Out in the great bush where men have time to think, Progress and Poverty was read with understanding and passed from hand to hand until the sublime truth of it was impressed on many.” >>>more
Who was Henry George?
Henry George (1839–1897), was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a youth, he sailed around the world as a cabin-boy, and then chose a career in journalism, beginning as a typesetter, when he settled in San Francisco.
1861
In 1861, Henry George married Australian-born Annie Corsina Fox (1843-1904), whose Anglo-Irish parents, English officer Major John Fox and Elizabeth Fox, née McCloskey, migrated to Australia immediately after their marriage. Following the death of her parents, teen-age Annie was sent to live with her wealthy uncle in Oakland, California, carrying her book collection (she was a reader), where she met Henry George. Her uncle disapproved of her alliance with the poor journalist: Shortly after her 18th birthday they eloped.
There can be no doubt that Annie's parents were familiar with suffering caused by the Irish "rack rent" system - "The Ulster Custom" - before they migrated to Australia. It comes as no surprise, then, that Henry George's early journalism concerning the impact of land speculation on "involuntary poverty" struck a public chord: George achieved renown as a journalist and editor for several newspapers; he became managing editor of the San Francisco Times in 1866, and editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, for four years (1871-1875), reporting on the impacts of the California Gold Rush and westward migration following President Lincoln's Pacific Railway Act of 1862.
Note: On Lincoln links to railroad tycoons, Lynn Parramore sheds new light: An Inconvenient Truth About Lincoln (That You Won't Hear from Hollywood), Jan. 21, 2013,
Some of the most powerful corporations of Lincoln's time were wildly enriched by having a friend in one Abraham Lincoln.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country....corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Henry George's first report on the crisis in Ireland was published in the Sacramento Bee on December 24, 1879. George's self-published Progress and Poverty, 1879, (pdf, archive.org or ePUB), became the all-time best-selling book on economics, storming the world across the 1880’s, taking David Ricardo's 1809 "Law of Rent theorem" to its logical conclusion: That current land ownership laws set up a pyramid society for the rich to live off the poor. George's prolific writings alerted the people to this abuse of human rights and provided a solution which led to a worldwide "Georgist movement" - demonstrating that taxing 'commons resources' - aka Land Tax, or the 'Single Tax' - produced the greatest prosperity with least adverse effects.
In summary, Henry George grew to become a popular social philosopher, during the late 19th Century, by demonstrating how poverty and unemployment could be ended by replacing all current taxation with a 'Single Tax'.
Proposing to tax capital gains from private access to "resources such as land, minerals, fossil fuels, air and water" (see Economic Rent Explained) challenged the wealthy elite of his day: George and his followers were opposed by the 'elite', while socio-economic law advocates increasingly see Henry George as one of the most important intellectuals of the Classical era. "Georgism" or "Georgist" describes advocates and supporters of his ideas.
1871 In his 1871 pamphlet, Our Land and Land Policy, Henry George first used the term "Ulster Custom" when he set out his theory on monopoly and poverty, advocating a single tax on private access to land.
Excerpt:
Dublin, Aug. 9. - "Henry George, the American economist, accompanied by an English gentleman, Mr. Joynes, Master of Eton College, visited Mr. Matthew Harris at Ballinasloe and afterward went to Athenry. There both gentlemen were arrested under the curfew section of the Crimes Act. ... The record of the arrest was made to read:— “Arrested, Henry George; accused by the police of association with suspects.” No protest against the arrest or Imprisonment was made to the Government through the American Consulate. One report states that when Gladstone heard of the arrest of George he was quite indignant at what he said must have been a blunder, and ordered his instant release, and that he caused the officers to be severely questioned as to their reasons for taking the author Into custody...The pretext for the arrest of George, alleged ‘‘association with suspects,” had no other foundation than the fact that he entered a small shop kept by an active member of the Land League to purchase a shirt button. The astute officer who made the, arrest deemed George’s possession of a copy of his wellknown work, “ Progress and Poverty,” conclusive proof of guilt... "Sub-Inspector Byrne being asked the reasons for arresting Mr. George, stated that he had acted on a telegraphic order from headquarters in Dublin to arrest them on arrival."... - Ireland's Struggle. Arrest of Henry George and Stephen J. Meany, Pilot, Volume 45, Number 33, 19 August 1882, Boston College Libraries.
The consequent international press coverage of the incident, which included favorable review of his book Progress and Poverty (1879), catapulted George onto the international stage, and led to translations in many languages worldwide.
"THE scenes into which Mr. George was hurrying exceeded his fondest wishes. Next to Gladstone, he was at the moment the most talked of man in England. This was chiefly because more than forty thousand copies of the sixpenny edition of 'Progress and Poverty'had been sold." – H. George Jr. The Life of Henry George, British lecture campaign, CH VI, 1884.
On March 6, 1890, Henry & Anne George arrived in Sydney for the start of a 98-day public lecture tour, covering 34 cities and towns across the country: "A cheering crowd marching in procession with a brass band accompanied the Georges in a four-horse coach, to the Town Hall, where the Lord Mayor made an official speech of welcome." – Association For Good Government
"Pullen's day-to-day chronicle and thoughtful appraisal of Henry George's fourteen-week Australian tour in 1890 provides much-needed further insight into a formative period in Australian political history. ... Pullen observes that this tour was actively supported by nonconformist ministers but hardly ever by Anglican or Catholic clergy. ...Of particular value is Pullen's informed scrutiny of the fundamental principles and the common misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Georgism ..." – John Holmes, Australian Journal of Politics and History:
Vol. 61/3, 2015, pp. 450-483
Abstract: One of the most important elements to the rise of Henry George to international prominence in the 1880s was his successful cultivation of a large Irish-American following. This was no small accomplishment, given the fact that George was not Irish Catholic, but rather English-American Protestant. Nonetheless, through his early interest in Ireland's troubles, marriage to Irish Catholic Annie McCloskey Fox, friendship with Patrick Ford and Michael Davitt, activism in the Irish Land League, travels through Ireland during the Land War as a correspondent for the Irish World, and linking the struggle of Irish peasants against economic injustice to a similar struggle of American workers, George developed an enormous Irish-American following. This relationship accounted for much of the early sales of "Progress and Poverty" and subsequent lecture opportunities, as well as making him known widely throughout the British Isles. The culmination of this phenomenon was George's sensational run for mayor of New York City in 1886.
Abstract: In the aftermath of one of the nation’s worst economic disasters—the economic depression of the 1870s—the California journalist Henry George strived to understand a distinctive dilemma of modern industrial capitalism: how could an era of unprecedented economic growth and industrial output produce widespread poverty, unemployment, financial panic, and acute inequality of wealth? The result of George’s investigation was Progress and Poverty (1879). The book challenged widely accepted doctrines of property rights and laissez-faire and changed the way many people thought about and understood the political economy.
George proposed a deceptively simple solution to the problems of economic inequality and industrial depression. In contrast to other social commentators of his era, who attributed economic disruptions to overproduction or unsound monetary policies, George singled out one of the most cherished institutions of liberal capitalist societies: private property in land. He called for the replacement of all federal, state, and local taxes with one tax on the full value, or market price of land—a proposal that became known as “the single tax.” Unlike the general property tax which taxed the value of land and buildings, the single tax only applied to the value of land. Furthermore, the single tax only reached land upon which value had attached as a result of location and natural fertility.
Although the single tax was never fully implemented anywhere in the world, George’s concept inspired and animated many of the most notable social reform movements of the era of high industrialism including socialism, labor activism, and the Social Gospel. More than any other late-nineteenth century reformer, George reintroduced land and the concept of economic rent into political economic debates that had in recent years become heavily focused on the clash of capital versus labor.
As a result, the issues of land ownership and land distribution remained important components of Gilded Age and Progressive Era reforms and policies. pp. vi-vii >>> more
In April 1891, a National Australasian Convention was held in Sydney
to discuss the joining of the colonies in a federal system, culminating in Federation in 1901. "The phrase 'Washminster' has been used to describe our system of government, as it blends features of the British Parliament and US federal model." – Parliamentary Education Office
Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin An international competition to design Australia's new capital city was won by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937) who, along with his wife, the renowned architect Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961), had worked closely with Frank Lloyd Wright and were supporters of the ideas of Henry George.
The Griffins came to Australia in May 1913.
In 1988, The Griffin Society was established in Sydney to commemorate the works of the Griffins, and "the environmental ideals and community life they fostered in Australia".
Preparing for 2012 Centenary Celebrations 'Dysfunctional' Canberra ignores Griffins'
By Glanda Korporaal, 'Dysfunctional' Canberra ignores Griffins, May 29, 2012, The Australian (No longer online)
FULL Report:
WALTER Burley Griffin Society president James Weirick yesterday lashed out at planning in Canberra as the city celebrates 100 years since the selection of the plan for the capital.
"The society is very concerned at the current state of planning in the ACT and the dysfunctional nature of the planning since self-government in 1989," Professor Weirick told The Australian.
"Planning has been divided between the federal government and the ACT government in a very insidious and dysfunctional way."
Professor Weirick spoke as the society released a video on the Burley Griffin plan to mark the centenary of its selection on May 23, 1912.
The society argues more attention needs to be paid to the plan for Canberra by Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin and his wife and colleague, Marion Mahony.
"Many issues that Canberra faces today, which are often described as shortcomings in the Griffin plan, are demonstrated to have been skilfully resolved in the Griffins' original winning plan but are as yet unimplemented," the society said yesterday.
Professor Weirick said changes announced earlier this month by Regional Australia Minister Simon Crean would further reduce the planning role of the federal government-backed National Capital Authority and the ACT government.
He said the Griffin plan envisaged a more high-density city for the national capital with extensive public transport and more residential areas closer to the north side of the city.
The residential areas would open on to a central parkland, which would have become a central meeting place and a "truly vital place in the life of the capital".
"The national government is not interested in the national capital," Professor Weirick said.
"Between the mediocrity of the ACT government and the impotence of the NCA, the fate of one of the greatest planned capitals of the 20th century hangs in the balance."
The release of the video follows the news last week that Canberra historian David Headon had discovered an original notebook that Burley Griffin and Mahony included to explain the 16 drawings in their entry.
Their plan was one of 137 entries in the competition announced by Home Affairs Minister King O'Malley.
Dr Headon, who presented the carbon handbound 29-page notebook to the National Archives last week, had found it while going through some old documents stored at the Planning Institute of Australia in the industrial suburb of Fyshwick earlier this year.
ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher has described the long-lost booklet as a "fragment of Canberra's birth certificate".
The notebook is on display at the exhibition to mark the centenary in Parliament House, which will run until June 27.
"Some people were going through some papers at the Planning Institute and I asked them to put aside anything which might be vaguely historical," Dr Headon said yesterday. "I was going through the pile and saw the notebook. It was the third document there."
Dr Headon, who is advising the ACT government on the celebrations for the 100 years of Canberra next year, saw its significance immediately.
"While there were copies around of the notebook, this was the original notebook which was sent with the plans which were finished in such as rush in the winter of 1911 by Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin," he said.
"The notebook is a human, working document, full of evidence of the husband and wife team rushing to meet the deadline for the competition. There are spelling and typing errors, and rubbings out, which show their rush to get the work done in time for the last boat for Australia."
The Griffin Society said yesterday the centenary of Canberra should be celebrated this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the selection of the Canberra plan, and not next year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the laying of the city's foundation stone.
The Vatican
While the Anglican Church of England did not endorse the Progressive Era's Land Value Tax movement, the Roman Catholic Church chose a pro-active stance against it (additional references here):
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII attempted to rein-in the growing number of priests and laity supporting Henry George's "Single Tax" movement by issuing an encyclical, Rerum Novarum – "of revolutionary change" – Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor"– which had the impact of formally categorizing "Land" as capital (when land does not 'turn over' in the sense of capital turnover).
Father Edward McGlynn
Rev. Dr. Edward McGlynn (1837-1900), of St. Stephen's Catholic Church, New York, a leading campaigner for the Land League movement, was directly challenged by the Vatican, including excommunication for refusing to curtail his pastoral efforts in support of the "Single Tax" movement.
Referring to Henry George, Dr. McGlynn said, "[George] is one of the greatest geniuses that the world has ever seen, and . . . the qualities of his heart fully equal the magnificent gifts of his intellect. . . . He is a man who could have towered above all his equals in almost any line of literary or scientific pursuit." – Louis F. Post and Fred C. Leubusher, 1887.
Part 4
Federation & the Single Tax Movement Back to top
NORTHERN TERRITORY annexed by South Australia on 6th July 1863
(substantially transferred to Commonwealth control on 1st Jan. 1911)
FEDERAL CAPITAL TERRITORY proclaimed in 1910
(re-named AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY in 1938)
Politics of Federation
The ANU's Australian Dictionary of Biography gives succinct insights on the lead up to Federation during the late 1800s.
For example, Professor of History Alan W. Martin's 1974 article on legendary politician and journalist Sir Henry Parkes (1815-1896) is deeply informative on the challenges of the time.
Excerpts:
. . . his exhortations still echoed the simple colonial nativism of the 1840s and 1850s: 'let us be of whatever faith we may, let us still remember that we are above everything else free citizens of a free commonwealth’.
[Parkes joined] . . . the liberal movement which by the early 1850s was becoming the most effective spearhead against the old colonial conservatives. . .
against the anti-democratic Electoral Act of 1851. . .
By 1853, Parkes was "deeply involved in organizing the Constitution Committee" . . .
The government, overwhelmingly supported in the assembly, passed appropriation and loan bills with an ease unknown to its predecessors. By late 1880 its Lands, Public Instruction and Electoral Acts had surpassed in importance any legislation for more than a decade.
From 1881, Parkes was internationally renowned as 'the most commanding figure in Australian politics' [toward the end of his public career] ... For Parkes, the principal departure of these years was the campaign which resulted in the Federation Conference and the Australasian Federal Convention of 1890-91. . . The following Federal Conference and Convention owed much to the private negotiations of Lord Carrington yet were also personal diplomatic triumphs for Parkes and at the convention he was, according to Alfred Deakin, 'from first to last the Chief and leader'. >>> more
1901 The Commonwealth of Australia is a sovereign nation:
a federation, a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy –independent politically and economically, but still not a Republic.
On 1 January 1901, Australia became an independent sovereign nation after the British Parliament passed legislation allowing the six Australian colonies to govern in their own right as part of the Commonwealth of Australia. – Federation Gateway: The National Library of Australia
Australia's Founding Fathers were aware that land and resource monopoly could be prevented by directing the flow of increased land values into the National Treasury. The ideas following from the American pre-Progressive Era's "Single Tax Movement" influenced Australia's Founding Fathers and became the cornerstone of Australia's tax system with the launch of the Australian Tax Office (ATO) in 1910).
1904 Taxation of Land Values in Australasia by A. F.Dodd, The Economic Journal, Vol.14, No.55, Sept. 1904, pp. 401-412 (12 pages) pdf
Excerpt: The growing interest felt throughout this country is the question of the taxation of land values, as evidenced in the recent debate in the House of Commons, gives importance to the inquiry how far the suggested political experiment has been found to succeed in the countries where it has been tried. The object of this article is to examine the actual effect of the system of land taxation in Australasia, where, except for a few isolated experiments in North America and in Natal, the only serious attempt has as yet been made to adopt the principle as a scheme of practical politics. In old countries, where the land has been appropriated for centuries, and where individual landownership is an integral part of the social system, to confiscate rent would be practically the same thing as to confiscate land; to attack vested interests which have been in existence for centuries, even though the system which gave rise to them may be in itself unjust, is a serious matter: but to prevent land monopoly from growing up in a new country, or to check it in its early stages, is a comparatively simple task, and involves little or no injustice. InAustralasia it can be tried under favourable conditions, for there is a vast extent of land not yet occupied, and, though the evils of land monopoly exist, they are in a mushroom growth, and the injustice is more glaring than in old countries.
The cause of the rapid development of land monopoly in Australasia is to be found in the English policy of dealing with the land. The Government aimed consistently at settling a race of small farmers on the soil, but the only system known to English law was that of individual ownership, and it was the creation of the individual ownership that made land speculation possible. Until 1831 land was disposed of by free grants, or at a low quitrent- about five percent of the value of the land granted, and never over 2d an acre. These grants were made on condition of residence and improvement, and the settle often had to feed, clothe, and employ a certain number of convict labourers- an advantage rather than a burden in a country where the great difficulty was to get sufficient labour. In most cases, after a few years, the settler was able to gain the freehold of the soil on very easy terms. By 1882 the Crown had granted away 4,000,000 acres, and had got very little money in return, while the growth of population made a larger revenue necessary... pp. 2-3
1910 The Australian Tax Office (ATO)was established in 1910 under laws specifically designed for collection of Economic Rent via a land tax which is still in place in The Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
(PDF: Federal land tax, archival document: Land Tax Act 1910)
1911
Origin of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA)
The 1911 legislation established the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In 1959, this original body corporate was preserved as the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) in legislation, specifically to carry on the central banking functions; at that same time, the commercial and savings banking functions were transferred into a new institution, which carried on the old name of Commonwealth Bank of Australia. >>> more
THE story of Australian money is peculiarly fascinating for it is possible to trace its development from the primitive beginnings in a penal colony with no initial monetary arrangements through to a fully fledged modern system.Download pdf
Australia has "no dedicated parliamentary committee
to oversee military deployments."- APH Library
Income tax introduced to fund
World War I
1914 - 1918
Unnecessary Wars (2016)
By Australian Historian Henry Reynolds, FAHA, FASSA:
"... how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars – without ever counting the cost."
Australia, in 1901, could so easily have become independent. ... (7:06)
Answer
Well, I think it is. But in a way, one of the themes in this book is that there was a quite different tradition. Particularly in the late 19c, leading up to the Boer War, among people -- often very prominent people in all the colonial parliaments, in many of the significant journals and magazines, particularly the Sydney Bulletin, there was a very strong tradition which took exactly the opposite viewpoint. So let's just make this clear: Where are those who said we must have 'great and powerful friends" - "large, vulnerable, defenceless"? They said "NO." No one. Firstly, he said, Australia has no natural enemies. There is no reason for anyone to want to attack Australia. If we have enemies, it is that we will inherit the enemies of our great and powerful friends. In fact, rather than making us safe, a close tie with one of the imperial powers makes us more vulnerable and puts us in danger. And, they said, with great prescience, eventually Britain will get involved in a major European war and we will be pulled into it. So, that was the view. And they said, Look, this continent is so large and it's surrounded by water, that that, rather than a source of danger, is a source of great security because we can't be attacked. We can't be invaded. Who would be able to do it? Who would have the vast resources to land a huge army on the continent?
(8:50) … And this is something the British realised. The most significant colonial office official, a man called Sir Charles Lucas, and almost the only one who'd ever been to Australia - the others wouldn't want to go to Australia for god's sake!
He said, in 1910 or 11: "We have to accept, although we can't let this be known, that we need the dominions, Australia and Canada, in particular, more than they need us." And I think that was right. We didn't need Britain any longer, and yet we remained tied to Britain until the middle of the 20th century.(14:00) >>>continue
Further - "The life, works and history of Henry Reynolds"
25 April 2019
ABC Radio National, Late Night Live
Phillip Adams' extended conversation with Henry Reynolds, the Australian historian who has had a profound and lasting impact on Australian law, culture and society. His books and writing span decades, his impact has been profound and his pioneering work challenged conventional wisdom, changed laws and reshaped our understanding of European and Indigenous relations. >>> more
TAXING WAGES... By Bryan Kavanagh, (Land Valuer, Australian Tax Office)
17 May 2018 ... WAS A ‘TEMPORARY’ WARTIME MEASURE! Remember?
But banks, miners and the 0.1% liked it, and they got used to it. . .
Maybe there’d not be enough ‘revenue’ from land and resource-based charges?
Wrong!
There’s more than enough. Homeowners privatise the rent into gargantuan land prices; banks then ‘lend’ against these inflated land prices to make their ‘super-profits’.
Miners, who ought to be paying 50% of their net profit (before tax) as rent for the natural resources they mine, spend $22 million in advertising to say that would be bad for us. They convince us it would be bad.
So, the 30%-40% of the economy that is our publicly-generated natural resource rent disappears into banks, to their shareholders, to miners, &c., and to homeowners.
Renters meanwhile pay the landlords rates and land tax in their gross rental.
That’s fair?
1920 The State of Victoria How Victoria
Adopted Site Value Rating by A. R. Hutchinson, B. Sc. A.M.I.E. Aust.
October, 1962
See document screen capture: relevant pages 15-21 HERE
Download the 24 page pamphlet in pdf format here
Excerpt from Forward
The years since World War II have seen a remarkable growth in the numbers of Victorian municipalities which have abandoned local taxation of buildings and other improvements and have turned to the rating of the site-value (unimproved land value) instead for their local revenues. … This rapid recent growth makes it timely to review the steps by which ratepayers secured the right of self-determination in the system by which their rate payments are computed.
An Act had been passed on 3rd February, 1914, to provide for optimal powers to make this change. This was the culmination of the efforts of many people but there was one fatal blemish. The measure was not to come into operation until proclaimed by the Governor in Council and this was not done until the value of land were assessed over the whole State under the Land Tax Act 1910 and available for use by municipalities. There were not forthcoming and indeed are not available from that source even today, some 48 years later. By 1919 it was evident that unless other means were provided to enable municipal councils to make their own valuations this praiseworthy Act would remain a dead letter.
To Hon. E. L. Kiernan is due the credit of introducing the small but vital measure needed, as a private member’s Bill, and pressing it through Parliament with the blessing of all parties. This was indeed an achievement and it is encouraging to read the tone of the various members’ speeches during the progress of the debates as recorded in the Hansard extracts which follow.
Hon. E. L. Kiernan's contribution did not cease with success in getting the vital measure carried. … (pp.1-2)
The Hon. Esmond Laurence Kiernan M.L.C. presented his detailed argument supporting the benefits
of Land VALUE Tax, pp. 15 - 23.
Debate in Legislative Council 19th November, 1919
From Hansard No. 20
(Bill read first time 29th July, 1919)
The Hon. E. L. Kiernan moved the second reading of this Bill. He said – This Bill should not require a great deal of discussion. It’s object is to amend the Rating on Unimproved Values Act 1915. That Act contained one section which has prevented municipalities taking advantage to it. Section 4 provides . . . Download the pamphlet in pdf format here
ABSTRACT: The political and economic instability of the Great Depression period produced many dramatic responses. It also gave rise to new public affairs institutions and the social criticism of middle class moderates who were as disturbed by political conflict and social division as by the evils wreaked by the economic depression. Through such forums as the Australian Institute of Political Science and journals of public affairs and social debate, including the Australian Quarterly, they elaborated their own social critique. Lamenting political conflict, emotional debate and popular apathy, they declared their belief in the power of rationality and the need for political agreement.
Moderate social thinkers, seeing the world in dualistic psychological terms, aspired for rationality and social harmony but feared division and decay. Social critics and more practical students of public affairs developed these themes in their analyses of Australian society and their public affairs research. Centred mainly in Sydney and Melbourne cluster of thinkers, sharing these beliefs, added particular stresses and offered varying views on the contemporary situation. Their emphasis included: the difficulties of social planning; the defence of freedom of thought; education as a force for ‘civilization’; a scientific approach to modern problems; the need for government action to remedy social evils; and the possibility of greater degree of national purpose.
The social critics and students of public affairs produced a large body of research and their criticisms encouraged movements for social and educational reform. Their endeavours were partly confined to a small section of middle class society and to their own institutional milieu as they retreated from the political arena. Their work also contributed however, to a larger transition in the structure of Australian society. Their thought challenged existing attitudes which thwarted change, their institutions were the precursors of government institutions needed to run a complex modern society, and they were influential in several spheres. Their criticism prepared the ground for the changes accelerated by the engine of war during the 1940s and they were to be part of the new administrative elite in post-war Australia.
1930s - 1960s
Religion in Australian Politics Back to top
“Our history lies within a period filled with a deafening clamour for rights, and a few shrill protests about duties. Our nationalism is a struggle between the landless majority and the landowners, and the air is rent by the complaints of those who have less against those who have more.” – WS Moyes, Anglican Bishop of Armidale NSW, The Argus 2 December 1930, Melbourne daily newspaper from 1846 to 1957.
Quadragesimo Anno (1931), the sequal to Rerum Novarym (1891), was issued by Pius XI to steer a course between socialism and laissez faire, seeking "social justice through social action": "The 1931 encyclical put the verb into the 1891 encyclical."
– The Honourable Race Mathews (quoted from unpublished filmed interview: 29/11/2016), effectively maintaining and marketing our current form of ’feudalism’ - as witnessed across 20c labor movement.
Religion in Australian politics. B. A. (Bob) Santamaria (1915-1998), remembered as the Roman Catholic political activist who "always spoke with his fingers crossed behind his back," (Mathews, 2016) was the force behind the Labor Party split in 1955, and a key founder in 1957 of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) which ended in 1978.
For a comprehensive analysis of the 1891 encyclical, see the following two pieces by Emeritus Professor of Economics, Mason Gaffney, University of California, Riverside. These thoroughly referenced reports are a must-read for those wishing to understand the central role of the Vatican in shaping economic history. (Archived index here)
Excerpts: A-2. Specifics vs. Glittering Generalities
Georgists are specific – some think TOO specific – about reform. Many of the religious, at the other extreme, expound glittering generalities but resist getting down to brass tacks. These religious are of all faiths, not just Catholic. It’s important to see the stars above, but I submit we must also keep our feet on the ground, though the ground be muddy.
Rerum Novarum (1891) and its followup, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), were more specific than most religions are at most times. Quadragesimo Anno (Q.A.) especially came at a critical time when nations everywhere sought radical reforms, and Q.A. pointed a way. The problem was, many of these specifics did not turn out well.
. . . C. Points of similarity and agreement
C-1. Natural Law and Rights; Justice
Both Catholics and Georgists give great weight to natural law and rights. These ideas have been rejected by most of the intellectual world, leaving Catholics and Georgists as natural allies to defend them.
Ironically, the Enlightenment philosophers, who are thought to have undermined Catholicism with their Deism, also generally believed in Natural Law and Rights. The world is wonderfully tangled and complex, and in that complexity we can probably find ways to support each other. C-2. Mechano-mysticism in modern economics. . . >>> more
How the church is splitting the Liberal Party By Mike Seccombe
July 22, 2017 The Saturday Paper Just as BA Santamaria’s forces once split the Labor Party, hardline Catholics are again threatening to divide politics – this time on the conservative side.
Excerpt:
History repeats itself, but always with variations on the theme. Sixty-odd years ago, a group of mostly religious social conservatives led by a Catholic zealot divided the Labor Party and condemned it to a protracted term in opposition.
Now a bunch of mostly religious social conservatives led by a couple of Catholic zealots seem to be doing their best to make it happen again. But this time they’re doing it to the Liberal Party.
Last time the main wrecker was Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, better known as B.A. Santamaria. This time, it’s Tony Abbott and Cory Bernardi. But the war is being fought on much of the same ground and the tactics are much the same, too.
. . . The modern Liberal Party, under founder Sir Robert Menzies, was overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon and above all Protestant – mainline Protestant, the kind of which is not so much a faith as a class. At one point, the federal party under Menzies included just one Catholic.
Politics were much more religiously binary then.
Catholics favoured Labor; Protestants favoured the Liberals.
Then Labor split. In 1955 a new party formed, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). It was primarily concerned with the threat of communism, which it correctly saw as antithetical to religious belief. It was also very socially conservative. To the limited extent it focused on economic policy, it tended towards the position of the Liberals. The DLP was not entirely Catholic, but it was the new home for conservative Catholics. The Catholic progressives stuck with Labor.
For almost 20 years, the DLP was instrumental in keeping Labor from power. But it gradually declined, and effectively ceased to exist at the federal level by the early 1970s.
As political scientist Professor John Warhurst of the Australian National University wrote in 2010:
“The transfer of Catholic allegiance from Labor to the Liberals at the parliamentary level has been the most dramatic shift in Australian politics over the past 50 years.”>>> more
1964 Cyril S. Wyndham (1930-2012), the Australian Labor Party's first full-time federal general secretary (1963-69), wrote the Land Tax out of the ALP’s 1964 policy platform – without the mandatory party vote.
With “The Land Boomers” bubble peaking in Australia, Henry George made an intensive tour advocating land tax in 1890. Such were its popular reverberations in the depression following the bursting of the bubble, Australia came to adopt a federal land tax in 1910: there was no federal income tax. The proposed Australian Capital Territory was also to be founded on a leasehold basis.
After Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies removed the federal land tax in 1952, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Arthur Calwell, attacked the decision in a 33 minute parliamentary speech on 24 February 1953 including: “We of the Australian Labour Party have always believed that the land is the patrimony of the people, and that nobody has a complete and absolute title to it …. The land belongs to the people, and its use must be safeguarded and protected at all times …. We have always believed in the land tax, and when happy days come again we shall restore the measure, imposing the tax to the statute book of this country.”
Well, no!
New 1963 Labor Party national secretary Cyril Wyndham believed land tax was no longer politically palatable.
He thought an Australian public gravitating to home ownership in the buoyant 1960s under Menzies would no longer brook the party’s land tax plank. Therefore he wrote it out of the ALP’s 1964 platform altogether. It was gone without the required party vote.
So, where both sides of Australian politics once supported it, land tax now remains an inadequate embarrassment at State government level, with problematical exemptions, thresholds, multiple rates and aggregation provisions, all acting to make it the bad application of an excellent principle. Our policy makers and the political class meanwhile look askance at the all-in land tax recommended by The Henry Tax Review. It has become “no longer politically palatable” because it offends the 0.1% and its followers.
There is ample historical evidence Australians used to be capable of intelligent thought. >>>more
See:
Australian Labor Party Special Commonwealth Conference, March 1966: report, findings and documents published by Cyril S. Wyndham, General Secretary Australian Labor Party Federal Secretariat >>> more
Excerpt:
Cyril Wyndham, the energetic, reformist outsider, changed forever the way Labor organised itself federally. . . And then he paid the price . . . he would seek to serve the party as a whole, even if that meant warning against going the “wrong way.” . . . Wyndham later described his job as to “stop the states from bickering” but that was only half of it. . . . the lack of resources, the uncertain authority, the entrenched power of the state branches – proved to be more influential in determining how he did the job and, ultimately, how long he could survive in it.
Having spent decades arguing about whether to follow the Liberals’ example and pay their national officials, Labor engaged in protracted contests about who should serve and under what conditions; more often than not, the result was high turnover, exhaustion and traumatic disruption.
In this sense, Wyndham’s career is an object lesson in the inherent tensions between institutions and the individuals who work within them. Wyndham believed it was his job to advise the party that it was going the wrong way; he was ignored and eventually kicked out. But unexpectedly, Wyndham’s demise opened the door for a party official, Mick Young, whose efforts did succeed in professionalising both Labor’s and Australia’s election campaigns.>>> more
"The Menzies Era" 1949 to 1966:
Robert Menzies, Liberal Party Prime Minister Back to top
ASIO I, SPRY- The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy (2010) The untold story of Charles Spry, Director General of ASIO and his war against Soviet espionage during the Cold War.
Broadcast date: ABC1 9.25 Thursday 4 November 2010.
IMDB summary: "With a nuclear arms race set to escalate the Cold War, Prime Minister Menzies appoints Colonel Charles Spry to take charge of the fledgling Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO. The staunchly anti-communist, fifth-generation soldier recruits new officers to fight a covert war against a cunning enemy. Their primary task is to investigate Australians spying for the Soviets and infiltrate Communist Party branches with undercover agents." — Anonymous
Partial transcript
I, Spry: The Rise And Fall Of A Master Spy
The story of ASIO's first master spy, Charles Spry, and his secret war against a cunning enemy that appeared to be everywhere, from the highest office in the land to within the spy agency itself. Sir Charles Spry, Director-General of ASIO 1950-1969
(22:00)
Narrator:
…Spry mysteriously began diverting manpower away from chasing Soviet spies to deal with what he considered new, more insidious threats: subversion, and mind-control.
Spry saw TV as a powerful tool for Communist propaganda.
ASIO recruited agents within broadcasters to inform on their colleagues. Influential Australians with left-wing views in the arts, academia and science were also 'dossierd'. In some cases ASIO used the information to damage reputations and stifle careers.
Every year, Spry supplied the government with thousands of names of people he considered subversive - people to be interred in detention camps should war break out with the Soviet Union.
"The definition of who was a communist broadened. People who actually weren't members, who simply signed a petition or took part in marches against the atom bomb, all of these people were regarded as a security threat." - Dr. David McKnight, Cold War Historian
"Anyone who was dissenting, you were right there among those hard-core people who had spied for the Soviets during the second world war, without the slightest ability to distinguish between discontent and disloyalty let alone treason." - Prof Des Ball, Intelligence Historian
Prime Minister Holt described the growing protests against the Vietnam war as psychological warfare against his government. Spry believed the Communist Party (CP) was behind the demonstrations. Their intention, to promote civil war. Thousands of young people would now come under ASIOs scrutiny, even tho' few had CP affiliation. "This zeal unhinged him because as the CP got smaller and smaller, through the 1950/60s, the apparatus to watch it became bigger and bigger and more powerful, until its whole point could be questioned, and was questioned.
When political terror arrived in AU, ASIO was nowhere to be found. e.g. anti-communist Croation migrants, etc.
. . .
Narrator:
One of Spry's most contentious operations in the 1960s, was the targeting of public servants.
OP TITLE: Persons with serious character defects as security risks: e.g. homosexuality, alcoholism, drug addiction.
"Anything that would lay someone open to blackmail. Of course, the irony was that the head of ASIO was known to like a drink. …behaving increasingly like King Lear - ever more dictatorial." - George Brownbill, Secretary, Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security.
Narrator:
To the despair of some of his officers, he began to see security risks everywhere, even within the highest office in the land.
"…one would get the impression that there was a conspiracy against constitutional rights in this country. … Spry had made ASIO too much in his own image." - Anonymous ASIS officer.
...
"ASIO become the decaying image of what it's leader had conceived and, at least at the start, brilliantly executed."
- George Brownbill, Secretary, Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security.
. . .
Narrator:
In late 1972, Labor returned to gov after 23 years in opposition, and brought with it an abiding mistrust of ASIO. The following year, the Whitlam government established a Royal Commission into AU intelligence agencies. Justice Robert Hope came close to recommending that ASIO be closed down. Amongst ASIO's hundreds of thousands of dossiers, he found a litany of affronts to the nations democratic ideals: invasions of privacy using illegal methods, negative security findings that couldn't be substantiated by evidence, and leaks of ASIO files to government ministers and the media.
"I regard that as quite ironic, because there is no justification for a security service to exist unless it does protect the constitution."
- George Brownbill, Secretary, Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security.
Narrator:
The most damning finding related to counter espionage: The fundamental reason for ASIO existence. No major operation over the years resulted in success. There were a number of indicators that suggest the agency was penetrated.
Narrator:
In his top-secret testimony at the RC, Sir Charles Spry made a startling admission.
Royal Commissioner:
"This Russian defector told you that ASIO was infiltrated? When did this infiltration occur?
Spry:
"1961/62. … They've brought the CIA to its knees. They've brought the FBI to its knees."
Narrator:
For two decades, a patriotic 5th generation soldier found himself at the front line of the Cold War. A conflict waged against a ruthless enemy, with weapons of surveillance and deception. But he also used those same weapons against the privacy and freedom of opinion of his fellow citizens. Democratic ideals his agency was charged with defending.
"I guess one of the lessons you can hope to learn out of the Cold War was that if you deal with an enemy, you have to be very careful that your methods don't become worse then the disease they are meant to cure." - Dr. David McKnight, Cold War Historian
“There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. For Australia this is such a time." – Graham Freudenberg (1934-2019), the author of Gough Whitlam's legendary 1972 speech: “It's time!"
By early 1972, Labor was leading in the polls.
Unemployment was at a ten-year peak and inflation had reached its highest rate since the 1950s when Labor Party Leader Gough Whitlam (1916-2014) pledged free public education, free universal health insurance, free dental care for students, renovation of aging urban infrastructure, and an end to conscription.
Excerpt:
The policy speech given by Gough Whitlam for the 1972 Labor federal election campaign launch resonates down the decades. Whitlam’s stentorian delivery, his stirring promises of equality, of sweeping social change, his breathtaking ambition for the future, his certainty and conviction; with that speech he strode into history. Not everybody heard . . . >>>more
The Dismissal
Dismissal of the Whitlam Government on November 11, 1975 was the most dramatic political event in the history of Australia since Federation. NAA: Australia’s Prime Ministers
The story of the Whitlam years is the story of a political system tested to its limits. It remains a story of relevance to contemporary politics.
Professor Jenny Hocking: "taking the National Archives of Australia to court to release the "palace letters' relating to the dismissal of the Whitlam government".
The NATIONAL ARCHIVES of Australia holds our most significant documents tracing the contours of our history — the defining moments, key individuals and pivotal episodes through which we understand ourselves and our history. It is the keeper of our archival heritage, in its own description "the memory of our nation". >>>more
Times have changed: Why Whitlam's dismissal matters
For the first time since Federation, the Crown ‘interfered’ in Australia's democratic processes on 11-11-1975, when Australia's Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and dissolved both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Multitudes gathered in protest across Australia: At the Melbourne Town Hall gathering, overflowing onto Swanston St. the Reverend Professor J. Davis McCaughey (1914-2005) opened the meeting with the Lord’s Prayer - and the crowd was hushed.
The Signal?
An excerpt from Gough Whitlam’s 1972 Election Policy Speech: "It's Time" . . .
Part 6/7
TAXATION
The huge and automatic increase in Commonwealth revenue ensures that rates of taxation need not be increased at any level to implement a Labor Government’s program. The rates for which the wealthier sections of the community including companies are liable are already high enough. The loss which the revenue suffers at this level is not because taxes are too low, but because tax avoidance is too easy. One legal tax avoidance scheme alone cost the revenue at least $30 million last year. A Labor Government will close the loopholes. To do this we will set up a permanent expert committee on taxation to expose the loopholes as fast as lawyers and accountants discover them. We will expand the terms of reference of the Asprey committee on Taxation to include State and local government tax methods.
The most pressing need in the tax field is to retard the trend by which inflation has forced lower and middle income earners into the high tax brackets. The Liberals have imposed huge, silent tax increases by the simple expedient of leaving the tax schedules basically unchanged since 1954. Inflation has done the rest, so that modest income earners of, say, $6,000 are being taxed at rates appropriate for very high income earners by 1954 standards. Our first step towards revising the tax burdens at the lower and middle levels will be to require the Treasury to produce and publish forthwith the “comprehensive review” which Mr McMahon as Treasurer said in August 1969 would be “urgently acted upon”. >>> more
Commentaries and Predictions: #Dismissal
The Whitlam government came in at the peak of a real estate bubble
In hindsight, the Kavanagh-Putland Index, first released in 2009, estimating the ratio of property sales to GDP for Australia, states:
Empirical significance
Since 1972, on every occasion on which the Index has declined more than 17.5% since the preceding year, and only on such occasions, a recession has started no later than the following year — that is, no later than the 2nd year after that from which the Index declined. >>>more
"But another land bubble develops under the Fraser government, just peaking beyond the 15% bubble line in 1981"
– Kavanagh-Putland Index (pdf)
1984 Lecture The Honourable Clyde Cameron AO (1913-2008-Obituary) served in the Australian House of Representatives for 31 years, from 1949 to 1980, including as Minister for Labour (1972-1975), as a Cabinet minister in the Whitlam government. His speech for the opening of South Australian Headquarters of the Henry George League on 13 May 1984 was titled: “How Labor Lost Its Way”(pdf) Excerpt:
Mr. President: Since my retirement from the National Parliament in September 1980, I have declined invitations to take part in public meetings or ceremonies. But the invitation to open this library and headquarters of the Henry George League of South Australia is a very special occasion for me and one that brings me great pride and pleasure.
It was on the 13th day of May 1884, exactly 100 years ago to this very day, that Single Taxers held their first meeting in South Australia. The very fact that we are celebrating the occasion is significant in that it demonstrates the fact that we still live; and while there is life, there is hope. Yes, hope that one day in the future when all other economic theories are exposed for the failures they are; our so-called economists will come to see the enormity of allowing billions of dollars of community-created economic rent to pass into the pockets of those who have been allowed to usurp that which rightfully belongs to the people’s governments which in turn must impose oppressive direct and indirect taxes and charges upon the community to make good the losses caused by the misappropriation. I refer, of course, to the practice that permits the economic rent of land to go into the pockets of individuals and corporations.
At one of the early Cabinet Meetings held by the Whitlam Government in 1973, I proposed that the newly-elected Labor Government re-instate the Commonwealth land tax abolished by the Menzies Conservative Government in 1953.
My colleagues were impressed with what I had to say about using that UNDERLINE tax to reduce other taxes that weigh so heavily upon the poor. They were impressed also by my argument that the collection of the economic rent of land would reduce the price of land for home builders.
. . . A
graduated tax on the unimproved value of land had remained an integral plank of the Labor Party’s Platform until 1961, when sneaky Labor politicians stupidly preferred the Tory option of raising revenue by high income tax and indirect taxation on the poor, and secretly removed the commitment to collect the economic rent of land without ever obtaining Conference approval for the deletion.
So, either by inadvertence, or maybe subterfuge, the fairest and most easily defended form of raising revenue has been omitted form Labor’s Platform ever since 1963.
At the first pre-Budget discussion after the Whitlam Government was elected in 1972, I raised the need to once again bring in legislation to collect the economic rent of land, instead of levying heavy direct and indirect taxation on wage and salary earners.
. . . Rent, is not a tax! It is merely giving to the community a rental equivalent of the special advantage of being allowed to hold the exclusive possession of a piece of land which due to its location or productivity, gives its possessor an advantage other don’t enjoy. So, by definition, a piece of commercial land in the heart of the busiest part of a big city, is always worth much, much more to the possessor than the same area in suburbs or in the centre of a small country town.
. . . It was in the shearing sheds from 1928 to 1941 that I began my advocacy of the Labor Party’s 60-year campaign for the simple truths expressed by the great Henry George in his books: Progress and Poverty, The Science of Political Economy, The Condition of Labour, Protection or Free Trade, A Perplexed Philosopher, and The Land Question.
("How Labor Lost Its Way" pdf)
1986
Independence for Australia (Cth = Commonwealth of Australia )
Queen Elizabeth II signs the Proclamation of the Australia Act
National Archives of Australia (2010)
Excerpt:
... shows Queen Elizabeth II (1926–2022) signing the Proclamation stating that the Australia Act (Cth) would come into effect the next day, 3 March 1986, breaking the connection between Australian law and British parliaments and courts. The Queen had signed her royal assent to the Australia Act (UK) on 7 February. Exact protocol had to be followed as an Act comes into effect or commences only with its proclamation on a date specified in the Act.
At the ceremony Queen Elizabeth presented Prime Minister Bob Hawke with an original of the Proclamation, and the Assent original of the Australia Act (UK). From the date of the Proclamation Australian law was ‘home grown’ – built on British foundations but built according to the decisions of Australia’s own parliaments and courts.
The Act becoming law was the last stage in the long process by which Australia became a 'sovereign, independent and federal nation', independent of Britain but sharing a common sovereign. However, the British sovereign continues to appoint the governor-general on the recommendation of the Australian prime minister, and a law is not enacted until the governor-general gives assent to it.
The Queen's Proclamation was the final step in a long process to pass the Australia Act (Cth) that had to include the states, the federal government and the passing of the Act by the British Government. At conferences held in 1982 and 1984 the Australian prime minister and state premiers had agreed to introduce uniform legislation in each of the parliaments. Each state and the British Parliament passed individual Acts before the Australian Government passed its own Australia Act.
Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke (1929–), a well-known republican, is shown with the Queen overseeing the implementation of an important part of his government's legislative reform program. His government sought to modernise outdated laws and passed major pieces of legislation in such areas as industrial relations, social security and sex discrimination. Hawke actively supported the 'Yes' side in the unsuccessful 1999 republic referendum campaign. >>>more,
Background: Federal Register of Legislation
The Australian Constitution was drafted at two conventions in the 1890s and approved by the people of the colonies of Australia at a series of referendums between 1898 and 1900. It was passed as an Act of the British Parliament and received Royal Assent from Queen Victoria on 9 July 1900.
1 January 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act
(The Constitution) established the Australian Government and gave the Australian Parliament the power to make laws on certain matters (mostly listed in CH 11, sections 51 and 52). The six colonies became Australia's six states, with the power to make laws on a much wider range of matters. However, if a valid Commonwealth law is inconsistent with the law of a State, then the Commonwealth law overrides the State law. The Constitution also establishes the Queen as a part of the Parliament (section 1), and allows her powers to be exercised by the Governor-General (section 61).
Does Commonwealth (Cth) legislation override State legislation?
... if a valid Commonwealth law is inconsistent with the law of a State, then the Commonwealth law overrides the State law. The Constitution establishes the Queen as a part of the Parliament (section 1), and allows her powers to be exercised by the Governor-General (section 61). >>> more
Excerpt: [Henry] George's theme was that the fundamental reason for the maldistribution of wealth in a free enterprise society was the private ownership of natural resources. He did not advocate the nationalisation of land as did some of his socialist contemporaries but a concentration of revenue-raising, or a single tax as it came to be known, upon the value of land, so that its yearly worth or economic rent would be taken into the public treasury in lieu of taxes on labour and production. He regarded the economic rent or annual value of raw land as society's natural income, increasing as the need for revenue grew with expanding population and social progress. These were not original ideas for they followed the track blazed by the French Physiocrats and later by political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, JS Mill and Herbert Spencer.But George carried their implications further than his predecessors and expressed them in unsurpassed prose and with compelling logic. >>> more
Commentaries on "How Labor Lost Its Way"
2011 Where Things Started to Go Wrong
By
Bryan Kavanagh, Australian Taxation Office Land Valuer (Ret.)
January 2011 (Follow his Blog)
Excerpt:
. . . when federal secretary, Cyril Wyndham, simply wrote the longstanding plank of the Labor Party to introduce a tax “on the unimproved value of the land” out of the Labor Party’s platform in 1964. It was never voted out.
The Hon. Clyde R Cameron, AO, Minister for Labour (1972-1975)
A speech “How Labor Lost Its Way” given by Clyde Cameron four years after his retirement from the national parliament, on the occasion of the opening of the South Australian headquarters of the Henry George League on 13 May 1984, documents this to have been the point from which Labor began to backslide on matters of social and economic principle.
Cameron records Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell’s parliamentary reaction to the Menzies Government’s Bill to abolish the federal land tax in the early 1950s: “We have always believed in the land tax, and when happy days come again we shall restore the measure imposing the tax to the statute-book of this country.”
Clyde Cameron’s “How Labor Lost Its Way” concluded: “This speech may even cause present day Labor leaders to once again take the road to social justice and fiscal decency.”
It didn’t. They haven’t.
Although Ken Henry’s tax review panel has also recommended both parties take the same road to social justice and fiscal decency, they refuse to do so, having a preference for the road that – privatising economic rent– has always led to the collapse of civilisations.
Such is the wit of our parliamentary ‘representatives' . . . >>> more
2013 Remembering the Whitlam era:
“…some carefully buried history of the past.” by "Murdoch's former right-hand man" former News Ltd executive, Rodney E. Lever" Gillard, Whitlam and Murdoch By Rodney E. Lever
9 June 2013, Independent Australia
The hysterical campaign by Rupert Murdoch's newspapers against the Government is a throwback to another time in Australia's history, says former News Ltd executive Rodney E. Lever — the Whitlam era.
Did they mention that John Howard was one of the busy bee Liberals who secretly brought Khemlani to Australia and took him to a Canberra hotel with his two suitcases of records of supposed dealings with the Whitlam government. After long days and nights sifting through the papers, Howard and his colleagues found nothing – absolutely nothing – which could be held detrimentally against Whitlam and his government?
No!
Did they mention that Whitlam’s first act when he took office was to end the Menzies lottery of death, in which hundreds of young Australians were conscripted into the army and sent off to die in Vietnam? Did they mention that Whitlam insisted on immediately bringing home all the Australian troops fighting and dying in a war that most Australians knew to already be lost.
No!
Did they mention that it was Whitlam who first broke down the artificial doors between the West and a China that had remained an international outcast even while they fought the same enemy as ourselves, the Japanese. Did they mention the fury of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger when Whitlam’s visit showed up the stupidity of the US and forced the hand of a Republican government to recognise the fundamental rights of China, whatever its choice of government at that time?
No!
None of the real story was told in this so-called "documentary".
. . . Now, in 2013, I see all the Murdoch strategies in action again to bring down another Labor government, unable to complete its long-term commitments to make this country into a thriving, progressive nation ready to take its rightful place in the galleries of international alliances.
. . . The changes were dramatic. Suddenly, journalism was less about accuracy and good writing. It was about sensation, scandal and screaming headlines, ideas that Rupert picked up from the lower-end English papers with a culture of opinion and wild imagination rather than fact. He imported them to Australia, together with a policy that created fear and rivalry and competition for his attention among his journalistic staff. >>>more
Author’s note (Google books excerpt)
There have been many hundreds of thousands of words written about both Gough and Margaret Whitlam. Gough has written about his political career in numerous volumes and in a vast library of speeches. Having written the biography of Margaret Whitlam, I realised that there was stil another story to be told. . . . The fact that they were both very tall gave them the appearance of natural leaders. They were both well educated, well spoken, erudite, witty and shared a vision of Australia than no other Prime Minister and first lady had ever articulated. . . .
Epilogue
Excerpt
This is the story of Margaret and Gough Whitlam and their love. It is also the story of the strength of their love for our country and its people of all ages, races, and religions.
They never lost their belief in equality and a fair go for all.
They never lost their belief in the political process as a means of achieving it.
They never lost their belief in the Australian people.
They never stopped believing in each other.
We must remember this. And pass it on. >>> more
2017 The facts of the Whitlam dismissal are more important than ever
By Christopher Pollard
12 Nov 2017
“Our haziness around the facts has led to many rationalising the dismissal. . . these rationalisations show a troublingly casual disregard for democratic process. . . Here are five facts you need to know to understand why Whitlam's dismissal matters... >>> more
Part 7
2007–2012 'Unlocking the Riches of Oz' Back to top
2007
"Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A Case Study of the Social and Economic Costs of Australian Real Estate Bubbles, 1972-2006," (2007), by Bryan Kavanagh During his tenure as Director of the Land Values Research Group and Land Valuer at the Australian Taxation Office (over 30 years), Bryan Kavanagh produced this study on the long-term effects of property bubbles.
Download the 2007 report here (pdf).
(Follow his Blog)
Unlocking the Riches of Oz uses Australian data as a proxy for the economies of the world to confirm this thesis.
SYNOPSIS
This report collates Australia’s real estate sales since 1972 to create ‘The Barometer of the Economy’. As the barometer demonstrates a delayed inverse relationship between property bubbles and the economy, we investigate the extent of Australia’s publicly-generated natural resource rent in order to assess the scope for ‘Unlocking the Riches of Oz ’ currently suppressed by the deadweight costs of taxation. Re-calculating GDP on the assumption of the notional public capture of one half of Australia’s resource rent since 1972, we show the benefits that would flow to all Australians, the environment, housing affordability and industrial relations by reducing taxes in favour of greater reliance on resource rents to be substantial.
In addition, Mr Kavanagh presented two submissions to the 2008-2010 Australian Treasury Department tax review:
According to Mr. Kavanagh's 2007 study, collection of Resource Rent (Economic Rent) would allow Australia to remove all taxes on productivity, i.e. income, sales, pay roll tax – all business taxes.
Mr Kavanagh's research revealed, in May 2007, that if the Australian government collected just half the 'rent' due, there would be:
1. Sufficient funds for all public services and public infrastructure, including free education and health care.
Basically, removing taxes on productivity and switching to 'user fees', aka economic/resource rent, will support "Good Governance".
2. At 2007 value, an annual tax-free surplus-based 'Citizen Dividend' between AUD$34,000. and AUD$49,000, can replace welfare, social security, and unemployment payments.
Why should everyone receive a Citizen Dividend? Because, we are all 'Global Commons' shareholders:
When we have paid the 'rent' for private access to 'the commons' we are eligible to collect an equal share of annual consolidated revenue surplus, after all government services have been funded.
"The adoption of basic income would be an economic revolution, but it will fail if the source of funds is even higher market-crushing taxes. A complete and successful revolution towards economic justice and prosperity requires the funding of basic income from a land value tax."
– Fred Foldvary, Ph.D.
The AIM: Tax private use of land and resources, and ...
• Take taxes off improvements
• Take taxes off labor
• Take taxes off people
• Take taxes off income
• Take taxes off wages
• Take taxes off business and industry
Achieve individual liberty, limited government & free markets
by eliminating taxes on everything – except land and natural resources. During the transition, restrict taxes to socially generated values but quickly graduate to fees, leases, dues, etc., as best defined by Frank DeJong, HERE
Social and economic benefits:
Removal of taxes on productivity will encourage innovation.
No more tax accounting or reporting.
Removing land from speculative growth cycles will provide affordable land (and homes) for everyone.
No need for a bank mortgage to access land.
A 'Citizen Dividend' would support vocational choices with free education.
End needless suffering, poor health, and the misery of involuntary poverty.
#1 Consequence:
Speculative Real Estate 'investment' following from trade with China: Australian consumer purchasing power flows out of the country instead of toward supporting local productivity. Those funds are then returned in exchange for land, aka real estate investment which a very small number of people profit from. Michael West provides an overview, in the public interest:Solution to housing affordability staring politicians in the face, June 1, 2015 –
Credit Suisse estimates some $28 billion of Chinese money has been invested in the Australian housing market over the past six years. Assuming – and there is no way to put an accurate number on this – that half of that $28 billion is black money, then that’s $14 billion of Chinese money inflating Australian house prices. – Michael West, 2015
#1 Solution:
The Stimulous Package: Treasury Secretary Dr. Ken Henry's now legendary advice – "Go early! Go hard! Go households!"
A turning point for 'moving forward' together Setting the stage: Bryan Kavanagh's study, Unlocking the Riches of Oz, was released in May 2007 and Kevin Rudd was elected Prime Minister in November 2007, following the August 2007 stock market crash which led to the 2008 GFC.
Immediately after the Labor Party won the 2007 election, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a 'directive' to the Australian Treasury Secretary Ken Henry which led to the tax review: Australia's future tax system (2010).
The review confirmed the original intention of Australia's Founding Fathers: Collection of Economic Rent aka Resource Rent is the only efficient sovereign solution to detrimental effects of speculative real estate 'Boom-Bust cycles' and complicated tax avoidance schemes.
"Most of us would like to have something for nothing. But the truth is we can't have that, so what we should do is to make sure our labour and our effort is untaxed and that the 'free ride' is enjoyed by us all collectively through the community, instead of making sure valuable natural resources end up in the hands of a select few who can grow fat on the labour of others." – Dr. Terry Dwyer, 2008
Excerpt:
THE Australia of 2049 might seem a far-off place, but Treasurer Wayne Swan has released updated population forecasts that confirm that now is the time to start reshaping the way we live. Australia today is home to almost 22 million people, but yesterday's preview of Treasury's third intergenerational report points to dramatic growth and change, with the population set to reach 35 million in 40 years - 7 million more than the forecast of just two years ago. Already, a population of 22 million is presenting challenges in the areas of transport, housing, water, energy, health and education. A country of 35 million cannot simply be a bigger version of today's Australia if it is to be sustainable. Change is unavoidable and it will not only affect our children but most Australians living today, since current life expectancies suggest about 60 per cent of us will be around in 2049.
Excerpt
The greatest problem confronting the world must surely be population growth? ...
Is the drift of population to the world’s great cities healthy? Is not the drift associated with the promotion of rent-seeking by errant tax regimes? Would the drift (in search of jobs?) be arrested if, instead of taxing people for working, we were to capture publicly-generated land rent, the annual value of locations? Would not the higher revenues drawn from cities act to reverse this drift and the rape of city hinterlands as Megapolis feeds upon itself at a terrible coast to rural and regional areas?
Although the Reverend Thomas Malthus was proven wrong and shown to have the cart before his horse, insofar as population growth has been found to decline with economic security, this hasn’t stopped the emergence a neo-Malthusianism which holds that populations must adapt to pathological environments before the health of the planet may be restored. This must be our starting point is their claim. But they are wrong. >>>more
Huge tests ahead for Rudd Michelle Grattan, The Age, November 21, 2009
"...Treasury head Ken Henry, Australia's most powerful public servant, a modern mandarin who learnt much from the recession of the early 1990s. Treasury's bold economic prescription for the crisis - go early, go hard, go households - was sound political as well as economic advice.
The multibillion-dollar spending that held the economy up
filled many voters' pockets and touched every electorate around the nation."
2010
Australian Treasury Departmenttax review: Australia's future tax system (2010) deemed collection of Resource Rent, aka Economic Rent via a Land Value Tax, the tax system of choice.
"Land Value Tax is efficient because the tax reduces the price of land but does not affect how it is used, or how much is used." – Dr. Ken Henry, Treasury Secretary, Australian Gov. (2001-2011)
Excerpt: Henry Review Recommendations (Treasury 2010b) C2 — Land tax and conveyance stamp duty
Recommendation 51: Ideally, there would be no role for any stamp duties, including conveyancing stamp duties, in a modern Australian tax system. Recognising the revenue needs of the States, the removal of stamp duty should be achieved through a switch to more efficient taxes, such as those levied on broad consumption or land bases. Increasing land tax at the same time as reducing stamp duty has the additional benefit of some offsetting impacts on asset prices.
Recommendation 52: Given the efficiency benefits of a broad land tax, it should be levied on as broad a base as possible. In order to tax more valuable land at higher rates, consideration should be given to levying land tax using an increasing marginal rate schedule, with the lowest rate being zero, with thresholds determined by the per-square-metre value.
Recommendation 53: In the long run, the land tax base should be broadened to eventually include all land. If this occurs, low-value land, such as most agricultural land, would not face a land tax liability where its value per square metre is below the lowest rate threshold.
Recommendation 54:There are a number of incremental reforms that could potentially improve the operation of land tax, including: a. ensuring that land tax applies per land holding, not on an entity's total holding, in order to promote investment in land development; b. eliminating stamp duties on commercial and industrial properties in return for a broad land tax on those properties; and c. investigating various transitional arrangements necessary to achieve a broader land tax.
"As stated in the Report’s preface, the Review took a long-term perspective and intended the Report to be a guide for reform of the tax and transfer system in Australia to meet the challenges from the economic, social and environmental changes envisaged over the next 40 years. The 138 recommendations made in the report are therefore intended to be viewed in the medium to long-term perspective and not in the short-term context of a three-year Parliament."
– Bernard Pulle, 2010
Stage One:Australia's future tax system (2010).
In 2001, mining companies paid approximately 40% of their profits as royalties to the state governments. By 2009, they paid less than 20%. Intending to lower taxes on the Australian business sector, Ken Henry called for an increase in revenues from the minerals resource sector via a Resource Super Profit Tax (RSPT) to be levied at 40% on all extractive industry including gold, nickel and uranium mining as well as sand and quarrying activities.
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) It is significant that theCharter of the Commonwealth (2011) immediately followed the suppression of the Australian Treasury Department's 2010 tax recommendations.
Proposed for the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Australia, and officially signed by Queen Elizabeth II on Commonwealth Day, 11 March 2013, the Charter defines sixteen core beliefs to be upheld and shared by all Members of the Commonwealth:
Democracy, human rights, international peace and security, tolerance, respect and understanding, freedom of expression, separation of powers, rule of law, good governance, sustainable development, protecting the environment, access to health, education, food and shelter, gender equality, importance of young people in the Commonwealth, recognition of the needs of the small states, recognition of the needs of the vulnerable states, and lastly, the role of civil society.
Deputy PM Julia Gillard's Big Opportunity -
a Big Mistake! PM Julia Gillard is remembered for her 9 Oct. 2012 'misogyny speech' (available on ABC News YouTube channel). Have we forgotten her earlier mistakes? Public servants are well informed of wide ranging possibilities for responsible government planning, but they are constrained by political directives, hence Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's directive to the Treasury Department provided an historic opportunity to be prepared, but, instead, he lost his 'job' to Deputy PM Julia Gillard. Following massive international Murdoch-led advertising and lobbying by the Minerals Council of Australia, Julia Gillard's "private talks" with key members of the mining industry led to her agreement not to implement the Treasury Dept. recommendations if 'selected' Prime Minister.
The Treasury Department's recommendation was modified and renamed the Mining Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) following the appointment of Julia Gillard as Prime Minister of Australia in late June 2010.
Excerpt:
Resource super profits tax (RSPT)
v Minerals resource rent tax (MRRT): a comparison.
RSPT: All mining and petroleum companies - some 2500 - would have been subject to the tax on so-called super profits.
MRRT: Limited iron ore and coal companies whose resource profits exceed $50 million per annum. The current petroleum resource rent tax regime extended to all onshore oil and gas projects, including coal seam gas. >>> more
"The highest third party expenditure in 2009–10 came from major advertising campaigns run by the Minerals Council of Australia who reported electoral expenditure of $17,184,924."
– The Australian Electoral Commission, 2011, p.33.
PM Rudd's directive led to plans for increasing publicly funded expansion of necessary infrastructure and public services, across the spectrum, over 40 years.
PM Gillard's principle initiative during her tenure: the Gonski report on school funding (Executive Summary). The report was stumped by funding system difficulties faced by governments and policy makers: Gonski’s final report bemoaned the fact that they didn't have the funds to implement it's educational recommendations. (Instead, we now have tertiary trillion dollar industries.) Apparently, PM Gillard did not understand the potential of the Treasury Dept's 2010 recommendations as a revolutionising GIFT for all Australians!
The following is a comprehensive examination of Gonski's
“Complex Funding” and “Future Investment”:
What's in the Gonski report?
2 Aug 2013
Excerpt: The report says funding needs to be increased by about $5 billion per year across all schooling sectors.
It says one third of that funding should come from the Commonwealth; and how the additional cost is borne should be discussed and negotiated between all governments.
It says the current funding system makes it difficult for governments and policy makers to decide how best to fund schools. What does the Gonski report recommend?
“The report proposes arrangements that we believe will deliver a funding system that is transparent, equitable and financially sustainable. It is also effective in providing an excellent education for all Australian students.”
- David Gonski >>> more
About Mitchell H Hooke "Mitch"
- Former Chief Executive Officer, Minerals Council of Australia
The man who killed Rudd's mining tax
by Matthew Knott
The Australian. November 29, 2011.
Excerpt: Mitch Hooke is the man who co-ordinated one of the most successful vested interest campaigns ever seen in this country:
last year's fight against Kevin Rudd's proposed resources super profits tax. He helped bring down a prime minister, saved the miners a fortune and proved that you can be an effective lobbyist even if the government of the day hates your guts...
... The MCA's anti-mining tax ads were played an average of 33 times a day on free-to-air TV last June – more than twice what the government could muster.
>>> more
Fast Forward: "I want you to be Australia's first female PM"
By Kevin Rudd
20 October 2018
This extract from former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's book explains what happened, but he doesn't reveal who Gillard had been 'dealing with behind his back" because he didn't know then that the mining council had begun lobbying 'hard' and that she would hold secret meetings! >>> more
The Kavanagh-Putland Index, first released in 2009, paints a compelling picture of the economy. Bryan Kavanagh, Australian Tax Office Land Valuer (ret.), is a leading analyst on the history of the inter-relationship between land and the economy:
The second iteration of the Kavanagh-Putland Index (pdf), presented as a powerpoint presentation, documents the total yearly real estate sales to GDP, for Australia, from 1972 to 2018, then divides them by GDP to form the index. The index suggests that real estate sales lead and drive the economy, and demonstrates how real estate bubbles generate economic recession when they burst.
Excerpt:
... from 1996 Australians receive its message again: there is much more to be had in real estate investment than in trying to earn an income. So, the real estate market shoots up to a record peak in 2004. The trend shows real estate sales to be doing much better than productivity... Any time real estate prices look to falter, the Howard government feeds them by increasing the grants to home buyers. . .
The bubble is a bit shaky in 2007, and voters have had enough of John Howard.
Kevin Rudd defeats John Howard 24-11-2007
... America collapses financially in 2007-08. and Kevin Rudd’s Treasurer, Wayne Swan, receives a call from US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson.
Kavanagh-Putland Index overview 1972- 2018
Have we morphed from constructive industrial capitalism into a fatal form of finance capitalism?
"Understanding the role of land in the economy was critical to classical economic analysis. Although it is even more critical today, it is ignored. Instead of surface land rent remaining near Petty’s estimation, as about 30% today, the neoclassical economist continues to promote the lie that it is now only about 1%. This Great Untruth is the main reason for the global financial collapse – and the 0.1% manage to keep it in circulation by way of the pathological study into which modern economics has degenerated. Bring back the intellectual rigour of Sir William Petty and the classicists!"
– Bryan Kavanagh, ATO Land Valuer (Ret.)
"When you've paid your rent, you've paid your taxes. If governments would collect their necessary revenue in the form of site rents, resource rents, monopoly rents and licence rents —all of which, by reason of their origin, accrue preferentially to the rich — they would not find it necessary to impose 'progressive' taxes on earned income."
—Dr Gavin Putland
There is a big discovery to be made, and this lies in an epochal change. – Bryan Kavanagh, Land Valuer (Ret.) Aust. Tax Office (Follow his Blog)
Bryan Kavanagh spoke to the value of collecting Economic Rent instead of income and business taxes when I interviewed him on 18 April 2008:
Excerpts:
When it comes to economics, the reintegration of the theory of land valuation is essential. It’s the new frontier —just as we sent Voyager out to explore space.
We're at a turning point where the economy is not working for us. There is a big discovery to be made, and this lies in an epochal change—the rediscovery of Resource Rent: Shifting—transferring taxes to Resource Rent is going to open the way for a whole new development for humanity.
The implications for humanity are greater freedom, more time for relaxation, for family, more time for the arts, and far less government control of our lives. These ideas might sound mystical, but they are the sorts of solutions that could be delivered to us, once we pass through this new frontier.
It's not just land rents we want to capture. We want to capture licenses for electromagnetic spectrum, aircraft slots, all forms of forestry and mineral licenses, all resources. These would supplement our charges on land values, and add to the enormous Resource Rent pot, that is now 285 billion—more than our current [Australia 2008] level of tax revenue.
We've witnessed the progressive loss of a sense of community, and land rents represent community. If we collected Resource Rent, we'd get rid of poverty.
We have a widening gap between wealthy and poor because the wealthy are capturing Resource Rent.
We've got to rediscover the land tax system. This would open up enormous benefits. It would fund infrastructure, education, health, all of these areas that are crying out for funds, and this fund is sitting there, being grossly capitalized by individuals and causing us to ratchet up taxes to fund them. But if we decrease taxes, and capture more of the Resource Rent, we would be doing as nature intends us to do—using growing Resource Rent funds for public purposes.
"The Tax Justice Network believes our tax and financial systems are our most powerful tools for creating a just society that gives equal weight to the needs of everyone. But under pressure from corporate giants and the super-rich, our governments have programmed these systems to prioritise the wealthiest over everybody else, wiring financial secrecy and tax havens into the core of our global economy. This fuels inequality, fosters corruption and undermines democracy. We work to repair these injustices by inspiring and equipping people and governments to reprogramme their tax and financial systems." >>>more
The Guardian Review:
“This is, in one sense, a dismaying Big Bang of a book: a chronicle of capitalism's frailty and foulness that digs far beyond its tax haven title and indicts the system that renders such crookedness not merely possible, but entirely predictable. It's not the banks or the hedge funds or the tame solicitors. It's the politicians as well, our politicians. It's not just the Cayman Islanders or the Swiss or the Panamanians. It's London and Washington, the OECD and the World Bank.
It's the whole damned thing. . ." >>>more
Part 8
The Honourable Paul Keating spoke out in 2011 Back to top
"They are super greedy. They are pig-rich!" – The Honourable Paul Keating, 7 Nov. 2011, ABC Radio 774 interview
Prime Minister of Australia, 1991–1996
Federal Treasurer, 1983-1991
Member of the Australian Parliament, 1969–1996.
NOTE: Paul Keating subscribes to the Free Market philosophy of Keynes and Friedman: "The recession we had to have" is Keating's legendary response to the last boom-bust cycle, late 1987-1992. Paul Keating is also remembered for his attempt to combat global trends by drafting economic policies based on Enterprise Bargaining: "A kindly social wage."
2011 interview
See a partial transcript of John Faine's hour-long interview with Former Australian Prime Minister and Treasurer Paul Keating on The Conversation Hour, 7 Nov. 2011, ABC Radio 774. Excerpt: John Faine:
What do you think of the Occupy Wall St. movement?
Paul Keating: I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier. You look at what’s happened in America since the advent of movement conservatism, which happened in the Reagan years, the American prosperity compact was torn up. This is a compact that began with Roosevelt, supported by Truman, and adopted by Eisenhower the new Republican President in 1950/1. Then you had Kennedy and Johnson, and Nixon, who was a Republican, all subscribed to it. And what was it? Basically, that you shared the productivity between wages and profits. This all stopped with Reagan, with the rise of Conservatism. And it got into full modality with George W. Bush’s administration. The end result is that Americans have had no increase in real wages since 1990. Where as, in Australia, under the policies of the government I led, — and Bob Hawk led, and since, of course, in the meantime, with Howard — the wages system I established, Enterprise Bargaining, Australians have had a 36% real increase in wages since 1991. The Americans have had zero. People are 1/3 wealthier here, after inflation. Whereas all of the productivity in America — big surge in the late '90s and the early naughties, say '97 to '04, — massive, like 9% a year, all of it went to profits. None of it went to wages. So, you just wonder why American working people, and working poor would take this. Occupy Wall St. is finally people saying: Hang on! This is shocking! We’ve had enough of this. Is it any wonder the top 1% have had a huge increase — a massive increase in wealth. Philanthropy is one of the things in America now. You know, you give away the money. But a much better idea is that you don’t get the money in the first place. It goes to ordinary working people.
John Fain: Do you think the rich are greedy?
Paul Keating: They are super greedy. They are pig-rich. The wealth here [in Australia] has never accumulated like that.
See, this is the point about the compact I tried to put together with the ACTU [Australian Council of Trade Unions]. That is,
– an Open Market economy,
– flexible exchange rates,
– flexible wage system,
– zero tariffs, etc.
– but grafted on to a kindly social wage.
Full universal health protection with Medicare.
A retirement income with Superannuation.
Access and equity in education.
When I began in '83, three kids in ten completed year twelve. When I finished in '96, it was nine in ten. So we trebled year twelve retention rates. And then, of course, 40% of kids left year twelve and went to university. That meant, if we had three times as many kids finishing year twelve, we had to treble university places.
So we took university places from 250 thousand to 750 thousand. These big social wage things are what makes Australia a better place than the United States. And why the Labor government — the model of the Labor government, what Tony Blair, 15 years later called “The Third Way” — I said to Tony, in a couple of conversations, it was the only way. That is why the excesses of wealth were never really created here. This economy grows about 3.5% to 4% a year. And anything that does that means there is a lot of wealth spinning off.
>>> more
Keating’s famous Big Picture approach – with Howard as the miniaturist
We started collecting cartoons in the last days of the Keating supremacy.
We used them to chronicle how the wheels fell off during the 1996 election campaign and that serial failure John Howard (once written off in a Bulletin headline as "Mr Eighteen Percent. Why does this man bother?") won in a landslide.
Howard found that the times did indeed now suit him, and he swept aside Keating's "Big Picture" as Peter Nicholson so poignantly captured while asking what might be its replacement.
After a slow start, PM Howard captured the nation's mood for a decade, and the cartoonists chronicled it all with their customary wit and insight.
. . . We write, therefore, in long-term appreciation of the wit they have brought to our public life. We also must comment on how radically the media landscape has changed around them.
Retirements and even death are in the natural order of things, and all these men leave substantial bodies of work. What makes their departures epochal is the fact that none has been fully replaced at their newspapers. >>>more
The Hon. Paul Keating -
Index of speeches HERE Selected: - The Centenary of Federation: Beyond the Celebrations - 30 November 2000 "...The speech is a grand tour of the Keating Vision: an Australian republic, a new flag, a genuine reconciliation, further economic reform, renewed engagement with Asia and the importance of Indonesia and the Indonesian relationship to Australia."
- Redfern Speech: Year of the World’s Indigenous People – 10 December 1992 “…It is a test of our self-knowledge.
Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history.
How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is,
it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia.
How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia...”
"The late Minnie Keating was much more than simply a Bankstown housewife. Indeed, she helped shape a nation. An astute observer of the world right up to her death, and with a voracious appetite for knowledge and news, Minnie Keating was also instrumental in her famous son's political life, which he recognised in his moving eulogy..."
Part 9
Liberal Party Government: Opportunism Back to top
"We're not here because we love the state and we've got bleeding hearts, for Christ's sake. We're here to make money. We're here to do business."
– Halliburton consultant Malcolm Kinnaird (1933-2014)
and
South Australian of the Year 2003
BIG Dealers: Water contamination, arms trade, depleted uranium storage.
1. Defence Minister (2001-2006), Robert Hill served under
John Howard, Liberal Party Prime Minister of Australia (1996-2007)
2. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull Liberal Party Prime Minister of Australia: 2015 to 2018
1. PM John Howard - 1996-2007
"Controversy follows the US giant Halliburton wherever it goes but little is known about its Australian operations."
– Wendy Bacon and Nick Calacouras, (2005), A Profit Powerhouse: an exposé of Haliburton's 'secret government contract' to build the Adelaide to Darwin rail-line "The Ghan", which then allowed transportation of depleted uranium for storage in 'the centre'.
Leading Dealers:
Robert Hill (b.1946-)
Adelaide-born barrister and solicitor Robert Hill (b.1946-) joined the Liberal Party during PM Malcolm Fraser's tenure (1975-1983). He was elected to the South Australian Senate in 1980.
Under PM John Howard's tenure (1996-2007), Hill became Federal Minister for the Environment from 1996, and Minister of Defence (2001 to 2006). In 2003, in his role as Defence Minister, Robert Hill commissioned a report on overhauling the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO), the operation responsible for procuring military hardware. Robert
Hill appointed the 2003 South Australian of the Year Malcolm Kinnaird to head the review team.
Two days after Robert Hill resigned from the Senate, on 15 March 2006, he was appointed Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2006-2009). Robert Hill went on to become Adjunct Professor in Sustainability and Co-Director of the Alliance 21 project at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and, a Commissioner of the Global Ocean Commission.
Malcolm Kinnaird (1933-2014)
The Australian driving this 'initiative' was South Australia's 'Australian of the year' 2003, Malcolm Kinnaird. “a man whose nickname isn't Bull Kinnaird for nothing”
-
Alex Kennedy, Kinhill Forced Back to its Core, 1993, Financial Review:
Kinnaird, Hill, deRohan, and Young, founded in 1960 by Malcolm Kinnard, became Kinhill Engineers Pty. Ltd. in 1996, was acquired by Halliburton's KBR in 1997.
"Mr Kinnaird was also a great mentor to those around him and advised Government's of both persuasions at a state and federal level. His 2003 Kinnaird review of defence procurement is still in use by the Department of Defence." (2014 Obituary)
"A Profit Powerhouse"
by Wendy Bacon and Nick Calacouras,
March 1, 2005, Sydney Morning Herald.
Excerpt: The Australian activities of Halliburton range from the Adelaide-to-Darwin railway to hundreds of secret Defence projects to management of the Australian Grand Prix.
Halliburton's Australian operations have never attracted much attention here, although in recent years this controversial US company has made headlines around the world for all the wrong reasons.
Headed by Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, before he joined the White House, Halliburton holds about $US10 billion ($12.7 billion) worth of defence contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, making it by far the biggest corporate winner in Bush's war on terrorism.
... In 2003 the Defence Minister, Robert Hill, commissioned a report on overhauling the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO), the operation responsible for procuring military hardware.
Hill appointed the 2003 South Australian of the Year, Malcolm Kinnaird, to head the review team.
... Through Kinhill, Halliburton has also become heavily involved in Australian aid programs... >>>more
Note:
In 2005, at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney, Congress created the so-called "Halliburton loophole" to clean water protections in federal law to prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating this process, despite serious concerns that were raised about the chemicals used in the process and its demonstrated spoiling and contamination of drinking water. >>>more
2.
Profiteering under PM Malcolm Turnbull's tenure 2015 to 2018 Malcolm Turnbull (b. 1954-) was the Leader of the Liberal Party in opposition from 2008 to 2009, and Prime Minister from 2015 to 2018, when he was 'overthrown' by Scott Morrison.
Few Australians were aware that Malcolm Turnbull served as Goldman Sachs' Australasian Managing Director from 1997 to 2001, and was a partner from 1998 to 2001.
As a former investment banker and real estate speculator, identified as Australia's richest politician during the 2016 Australian federal election, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was named, among many others, in the Panama Papers off-shore tax haven scandal.
Menzies Research Centre blames Turnbull for water mess by Myriam Robin
Dec. 11, 2019, Financial Review
Excerpt:
. . . Liberal Party-affiliated Menzies Research Centre has joined the ranks of those who can't believe he was ever allowed in in the first place? . . . blamed the 29th prime minister for having "separated land from water rights along the Murray", in doing so having "sowed the seeds of environmental destruction and pointless hardship for farmers">>> more
PSIRU: United Water (Australia), chaired by Malcolm Kinnaird, was created for the privatisation of water services in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1996. ABOUT Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU)
"We're here to make money" Some of our most exalted public figures share an interest in allowing foreign title to land and natural resources in Australia. Potential implications can be illustrated in just one of many vivid examples – and this includes insights reported by William Birnbauer Ph.D:
(ii) Tapping Australia's water, The Age, May 7 2003 On United Water's financial success and rising water prices, quoting South Australia's own Australian of the year 2003, Malcolm Kinnaird (1933-2014)
Excerpt: Figures from the Australian Council for Infrastructure Development show that, since 1993, more than $1100 million of public-private partnership contracts have been signed in the water industry. Most of these contracts involve the world's biggest private water companies. ... United Water won't release the financial details of its contract, but its chairman, Malcolm Kinnaird, describes the returns as excellent. "We're not here because we love the state and we've got bleeding hearts, for Christ's sake. We're here to make money. We're here to do business,"– Malcolm Kinnaird
3.
Arms trade - under PM Malcolm Turnbull's tenure: Australia unveils plan to become one of world’s top 10 arms exporters PM [Turnbull] spruiks jobs for local manufacturers but Tim Costello of World Vision says ‘whatever money we make from this dirty business will be blood money’ by Gareth Hutchens, The Guardian, 29 January, 2018
Excerpt:
"Australia is set to become one of the world’s largest arms exporters under a controversial Turnbull government plan. The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has unveiled a new “defence export strategy” setting out the policy and strategy to make Australia one of the world’s top 10 weapons exporters within the next decade.
Hailing it a job-creating plan for local manufacturers, the Coalition says Australia only sells about $1.5bn to $2.5bn in “defence exports” a year and it wants the value of those exports to increase significantly..." >>> more
2023 Oh the weaponising: another symptom of decline
By Mike Scrafton Jul 4, 2023
‘Weaponise’ is the word de jour in America. Aside from the crude partisan employment of the term by Trump and other American politicians, it has subtly found its way into mainstream publications. Such loaded terms corrupt analysis by imposing implicit judgements that obviate the need for serious thought. Once condemned for weaponising, it cannot then be conceded that the target of the accusation can have legitimate reasons for their actions."
Note: Mike Scrafton was a Deputy Secretary in the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, senior Defence executive, CEO of a state statutory body, and chief of staff and ministerial adviser to the minister for defence.
>>>more
"... a registered native title claimant has a right to negotiate.
... compulsory acquisition of land – review of decision to issue certificate of urgency – proposed nuclear waste repository – whether open to Minister to be satisfied of ‘urgent necessity for the acquisition’ – whether open to the Minister to be satisfied ‘it would be contrary to public interest’ for acquisition to be delayed."
What is CSIRO doing about it?
CSIRO has been using robots which can travel under and on top of the tightly stacked storage drums to better understand the physical condition and contents. ...
What are we finding?
Gamma imaging of the outermost drums conducted by ANSTO indicated very low levels of activity in those drums scanned. The majority of drums showed no dose above background levels of natural radiation. ...
Uranium mined in Australia is currently contained to four sites: Ranger near Jabiru in Top End NT; Olympic Dam near Roxby Downs; and Beverley and Honeymoon in outback SA ….
Nuclear energy is not ‘clean’ energy. Mining uranium is carbon intensive and leaves massive quantities of tailings, nuclear reactors are energy intensive to build, there is no solution to safely storing nuclear waste, and nuclear energy production can cause catastrophic accidents like that of Chernobyl and Fukushima – which are still leaking radiation into the environment today. >>>more
HAWKER, Australia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Enice Marsh remembers the black clouds of “poison stuff” that billowed from the northwest after British atomic bomb tests in the 1950s spread fallout across swathes of South Australia.
Now a new kind of radioactivity could head to her ancestral home in the remote Flinders Ranges - a nuclear waste dump.
...
Conflict of Interest?
Wallerberdina is co-leased by Grant Chapman, a retired Liberal Party lawmaker who in 1995 chaired a Senate committee that called for a central repository for nuclear waste…. He declined to say how much he could profit from the sale. Media reports have said he could make four times the market value of the land. >>>more
Introduction
Australia has had a long involvement in nuclear science and technology, despite not developing either a domestic nuclear power industry or a nuclear weapons capability. Although Australia contemplated doing both these things in the late 1960s, historically the country's main roles have been as:
• a user of ionising radiation and nuclear technologies in applications in medicine, research and industry from the end of the 19th century to the present day
• a long-standing player in nuclear research, hosting one of the world's first nuclear research reactors
• a test site for British nuclear weapons tests, and
• a supplier of uranium to the world, which continues to the present day. >>>more
(v) State of South Australia v
Honourable Peter Slipper MP [2003] and
[2004]
(v)
Australian gov. uranium overview
(vi) Halliburton Watch
Part 11
Key factors for Australians to remember Back to top
Good government leads!
In retrospect: The 2008 "solution"
Former Treasury head Ken Henry attacks political system in Canberra conference by Chris Uhlmann, ABC News 23 Feb 2017
Excerpt:
"Every government proposal of the last 10 years to reform the tax system has failed." . . .
He pointed to four policy challenges that demanded urgent attention and which were critical to building the Australia that Australians want: Budget repair
Planning for a strongly growing, but ageing, population
Settling a framework for climate change mitigation and energy security. Making the most of the Asian century "Australians are calling for their leaders, in politics, in business and in the broader community, to develop a shared commitment to a clear vision for our future," Dr Henry said. "It's time to deliver.">>> more
Kevin Rudd shared his views on Rupert Murdoch's role: A powerful influence on the Australian media, politics and government policy: Cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy
By Kevin Rudd, 27 August 2018, Sydney Morning Herald
"...there is a much deeper question of what underlying forces have been at work that have brought us this low. The uncomfortable truth is, since the coup of June 2010, Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?"– Kevin Rudd, 2018
There is no peak body in the country which conducts its business as belligerently, and its proponents would say as successfully, as the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA). . . . An investigation of the financial statements of the MCA shows the not-for-profit association has booked revenues of more than $200 million over the past 11 years. Revenues peaked at $35 million, $32 million and $37 million in 2010, 2011 and 2012 when the group was busy fighting the mining tax, the carbon tax and the Renewable Energy Target.This is but a fraction of the story however.>>> more
2. Dirty Power – Politics
and Australia’s Coal Networks May 8, 2019, produced by Greenpeace Australia Pacific
Investigation led by Michael West:
“We've uncovered the web of connections between the world’s biggest coal giants, industry groups, lobbyists and powerful media organisations that serves to halt action on climate change and stall the transition to clean energy. The coal industry has infiltrated Australia’s federal government through a secretive network of ties, working to influence Australia’s political decisions at the highest level: right up to the office of the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison.
The ‘Revolving Door’ series details the movement of Australian politicians, senior staffers and senior bureaucrats into the industry they oversaw and vice versa.
We are constantly updating this section with new stories exposing conduct contrary to good governance, conflicts of interest and too often rules being ignored and the individuals who flout them not being taken to task. . .
E.g. In September 2018, Brendan Pearson, former CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia, was appointed Senior Advisor for the Minister for Finance and Leader of the Government in the Senate. Mr Pearson's employment history is available HERE
The Global Commons includes the value of land and minerals, atmosphere, oceans, biodiversity, energy, culture, money systems, scientific knowledge, internet, etc.
Economic Rent (aka Resource Rent) represents the wealth that comes from private access to or control of any of these resources. Collection and distribution of 'Rent' -instead of taxing income and productivity- is the administrative method recommended by Classical Political Economists.
In Who Owns the World (2009), Kevin Cahill states:
"
The purpose of all the feudal land laws, derived from the fundamental principle of the feudal system was to prevent the population owning land. ... landownership in too few hands is probably the single greatest cause of poverty."
And of economic collapse.
And of class.
And of oppression.
An honourable lineage - "Australia's future tax system" is the 'Single Tax' solution to modern feudalism.
The Australian Treasury Department's 2010 "Australia's future tax system" tax review recommendations have a lineage inspired by the French Physiocrats who were themselves inspired by China's 'ancient' methods, aka Neo-Confucianism: China's 4000 year old land tax system.
The Law of Rent
Around 1809, English Economist David Ricardo (1772-1823) defined the income derived from the ownership of land and other free gifts of nature as "The Law of Rent" (aka Economic Rent, Ricardo's Law, Resource Rent), with collection methods referred to as Single Tax | Resource Rent | Land Value Tax | Site Value Tax, and more:
... without a knowledge [of The Law of Rent], it is impossible to understand the effect of the progress of wealth on profits and wages, or to trace satisfactorily the influence of taxation on different classes of the community. – David Ricardo, (1772-1823), British political economist
One hundred years later, in 1879, the highly energetic public-spirited American journalist Henry George explained the fundamentals of the 'Single Tax' system to international audiences with his self-published best-seller, Progress and Poverty (pdf).
See
Historical Timeline: A Short History of Economics HERE
Back to #1 Solution
Two Reminders -
from Bryan Kavanagh, Australian Tax Office, Land Valuer (ret).
Wrong! There’s more than enough. Homeowners privatise the rent into gargantuan land prices; banks then ‘lend’ against these inflated land prices to make their ‘super-profits’.
Miners, who ought to be paying 50% of their net profit (before tax) as rent for the natural resources they mine, spend $22 million in advertising to say that would be bad for us. They convince us it would be bad.
So, the 30%-40% of the economy that is our publicly-generated natural resource rent disappears into banks, to their shareholders, to miners, &c., and to homeowners. Renters meanwhile pay the landlords rates and land tax in their gross rental. That’s fair?Source
The USA calls it “antitrust”, whereas Australians prefer the term “regulation”. It’s about authorities we give the power to make decisions and arrangements to end business corruption, collusion, cartels, monopoly, excessive power, &c.
I know, stop laughing! It never works and it never will.
When they run out of ideas, regulators usually seek to break monopolies up into smaller pieces. But I have a question: Why is it commercial practice at the small business level that when a ‘going concern’ is leased, the net profit is split equally (before income tax, depreciation and amortisation, and after any adjustment for non-recurrent expenditures) as landlord’s rental and tenant’s profit, but this isn’t done for giant monopolies when the nation is the landlord of the used resource?
The Rudd government tried to do something along these lines with the Resource Super Profits Tax on mining companies, but it went awry when the companies, most of them American, spent up big in an advertising campaign to scare the wits out of Australians. And it worked.
If tenants of small businesses were to jack up on paying any rent because they also pay tax, what do you think the landlord would do about the lease? …….. Yup! ?
Where exactly is the point where you get big enough that you don’t have to comply with normal commercial practice when, like Google or Facebook, you are able to threaten governments that you will remove your ‘service’ if you’re required to do what other businesses have to do?
‘Regulation’ isn’t an answer; it’s part of the problem. If mega-companies are mining the nation’s mineral wealth, or Big Tech is using the electromagnetic spectrum, they owe 50% net profit to their landlord, the national government. Governments have proven delinquent in acting in the national interest, using ‘regulators’ as an excuse to institute nonsense, whilst ignoring common sense solutions to gargantuan monopolies.>>>more
Australians can't underestimate the seriousness of the task ahead for the establishment of an Australian Republic. It is a reminder that we need to consider making significant changes to our economic system, and especially our taxation system, if we really want our entire society to prosper.
In the
true spirit of Australia's 1901 Founding Fathers During early 2016, The Celtic Club of Melbourne ran a competition for a Declaration of the Australian Republic. The only rule was that it be 470 words, the length of the Irish Proclamation posted and read by Padraig Pearse on the steps of the General Post Office, Dublin, 24 April 1916.
We the Australian people declare ourselves to be a self-governing republic, totally free of formal links to other countries in our governance arrangements, based on our established democratic traditions of a parliament freely elected by universal adult suffrage, the separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial arms of government, and a commitment to the rule of law, applied equally and consistently to all citizens.
In making this declaration we recognise the continuing need to reconcile ourselves with the original inhabitants of this island, including by formal recognition in the Australian Constitution, of their prior occupation of the continent over thousands of years.
We acknowledge that this declaration is the final step on Australia’s journey to total self-government, initiated by the rebels of Eureka in 1854, and continued in the refusal to establish an hereditary (‘bunyip’) aristocracy, the extension of the suffrage to women ahead of other countries, and, belatedly, to indigenous Australians, and in the enshrinement of the fair go and respect for others as key principles in Australia’s economic and social policies, programs and institutions.
As a Republic, the citizens of Australia will continue to enjoy the rights and freedoms, now central to the Australian way of life, namely:>>> more
...greater equality usually makes most difference to the least well off, but still produces some benefits for the well off. ... higher levels of income inequality damage the social fabric that contributes so much to healthy societies. – Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009)
"The uplift in the value of a property due to “ordinary market growth", like the uplift due to infrastructure, is not the owner's work, but rather the owner's appropriation of the fruits of other people's work. As both uplifts are unearned, the owner has no greater moral right to the one than to the other, and suffers no injustice if any part of either uplift is clawed back through the tax system."– Dr. Gavin Putland
"If we are born with equal rights, why are some people rich, while most people are poor? It is really about justice – economic justice. Social justice is a worthy aim, but without economic justice it is unattainable. There is a fairer way to share the earth’s bounty, so that the widening gap between rich and poor can be closed."
– Leo Foley, Hobart City Council, Tasmania, Australia
"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (1906-1945), German theologian
Why do people, including many economists, think a recession causes house prices to fall, when in reality falling house prices cause a recession?
Across the political and media elite in Australia, a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam, who has died. His achievements are recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.
Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75. An American commentator wrote that no country had "reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution". Whitlam ended his nation's colonial servility. He abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supported "zones of peace" and opposed nuclear weapons testing.
Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country's resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to "buy back the farm". In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history, Britain's colonisation of Australia, and the question of who owned the island-continent's vast natural wealth.
Latin Americans will recognise the audacity and danger of this "breaking free" in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power. Australians had served every British imperial adventure since the Boxer rebellion was crushed in China. In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of Vietnam, then provided "black teams" to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington's informants during the Whitlam years.
Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be "vetted or harassed" by the Australian security organisation, ASIO - then, as now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the US bombing of Vietnam as "corrupt and barbaric", a CIA station officer in Saigon said: "We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators."
Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. "Try to screw us or bounce us," the prime minister warned the US ambassador, "[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention".
Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, "This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House... a kind of Chile [coup] was set in motion." >>>more
