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The article comments on a series of articles published in the last few years in the Australian magazine "Progress," by A.R. Hutchinson of Melbourne, that focuses on studies made by the Land Values Research Group of which Hutchinson is director of research. Hutchinson classifies the Australian states into two groups based on the proportionate burden of taxes on land values. The first group of states consists of Queensland, New South Wales, and Western Australia. In all of these, local real estate taxes are, in general, levied on land values only. Land-value taxes in Queensland take for the public, he estimates, more than half of the annual rental value of the land; in New South Wales nearly a third; in Western Australia about a sixth. Attention is called to the fact that those districts in South Australia and Victoria, which do tax land values as such, are the districts which contributed most to their states' better showing than Tasmania. Thus, in Victoria, although at the 1921 census only 16 percent of the state population was in the fourteen districts rating land values, these districts accounted for 46 per cent of the total increase in dwellings for the State between the two census years.

The author discusses the role and status of the generalist and the specialist by contrasting Australian and British practice in government services. With the disperse and not easily exploitable resources of the Australian Colonies, the development of the country became the responsibility of Colonial Governments as of private enterprise. The first public service legislation in Australia, the Victorian Service Act of 1862, divided the whole service into a Professional and an Ordinary Division, with no special recognition for the head of a department. On the other hand, the Institution of Professional Civil Servants has been making efforts to obtain better salaries and a better share in the administration of professional departments since 1918 in Great Britain.