1. The Challenge of Australian Tax Policy.
- Author
-
Brown, Harry Gunnison
- Subjects
FISCAL policy ,TAXATION ,PUBLIC administration ,CENSUS ,HOME economics - Abstract
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.
- Published
- 1949
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