Prosper Australia

Tickets are on sale now for the 2026 Annual Henry George Commemorative Dinner & Address.

Adam Creighton will deliver this year’s keynote address. Adam is an award-winning journalist, Senior Fellow and Chief Economist at the Institute for Public Affairs, and a previous winner of the E.J. Craigie Writing Award for his piece, "Land levy an efficient and moral revenue raiser."

Adam Creighton’s address will be on the topic: An Australian Land Tax: Past, Present and Prospects.

Date: Thursday, Sept 17th 2026
Time: 6:30 PM
Location: Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, Carlton, VIC 3053

Early bird tickets available for a limited time.

Book now: https://www.prosper.org.au/hgd2026

Vacancy is the problem. But a vacancy tax was never going to be the solution.

New figures show hundreds of Victorian property owners have been caught avoiding the Vacant Residential Land Tax. Yet that's only a fraction of the homes that appear to be sitting empty.

Our research found more than 30,000 completely empty and another 70,000 potentially vacant homes across Melbourne in 2024. Despite that, only a few thousand properties paid the tax, with hundreds more caught through compliance investigations.

The issue isn't that the tax has no value. It's that it's trying to solve a systemic problem with a highly targeted, complex tax that depends on exemptions, self-reporting, and enforcement.

A broad-based land tax is a better answer.

Unlike a vacancy tax, a land tax applies whether a property is occupied, vacant, a holiday home, or an investment. Owners pay the same regardless, creating a constant incentive to put valuable land to its best use rather than leaving it idle.

It also removes the need to police occupancy, closes loopholes, and can replace inefficient taxes like stamp duty that discourage people from moving.

If we want a housing system that rewards productive use of land instead of speculation, we should stop asking who is vacant and start asking why we tax work and transactions more heavily than land itself.

Read the story: https://tinyurl.com/4kmxxj2k

We often talk about AI as if it exists somewhere above us: a weightless world of algorithms, data and digital intelligence.

But every byte of data has a physical footprint.

AI depends on data centres, and data centres depend on land, energy, water, transport links and public infrastructure. They are built on the ground, in communities, using resources that come from the real economy.

The technology may be new, but the underlying economics are far from it.

Whenever a new wave of innovation arrives, it creates enormous increases in land values in the places where that infrastructure is concentrated.

Those gains are not created by the landowner alone. They are shaped by collective investment: public roads, planning decisions, energy networks, skilled workers and decades of taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

There is nothing wrong with people creating wealth through innovation, entrepreneurship and hard work. We should celebrate it.

But when prosperity is built partly on the value created by the wider community, we should ask whether the community receives a fair return.

The AI boom may happen in the cloud, but its wealth is grounded in land.

The question is: how do we make sure the benefits of this new era flow beyond those who happen to own the ground beneath it?

https://www.prosper.org.au/2026/07/the-cloud-has-a-land-problem-prosper-australia-calls-for-public-share-of-digital-windfalls/

Tickets for the Victorian Q&A tour of Common Wealth are now available.

Next week we are in Carlton, Castlemaine, Geelong, Daylesford and Eaglehawk.

Tickets are selling fast.

Get yours today.

https://garage.com.au/common-wealth/

Fresh off a sell-out first week, a whole new raft of screenings has been announced for the exciting new film Common Wealth.

We look forward to seeing our members and supporters at the Victorian screenings, where we are excited to be sitting on panels from Cinema Nova through to the freshly opened Daylesford Cinema.

See you there!

https://commonwealthfilm.com/

The current debate around capital gains tax has highlighted an important question that deserves much greater attention in housing and tax policy circles.

Much of the discussion has focused on how the Commonwealth taxes capital gains after they've been realised. But far less attention has been paid to where many of those gains originate in the first place.

This opinion piece from our report co-author, Henry Williams, highlights that state governments are giving away billions of dollars in publicly-created development rights each year, allowing value created through planning decisions to be privatised rather than returned to the community. It's a perspective that shifts the conversation from taxing windfalls after the fact to asking whether those windfalls should arise at all.

As governments search for ways to improve housing affordability, fund infrastructure, and reform inefficient state taxes, pricing development rights deserves to be part of the conversation.

It's encouraging to see this issue receiving wider attention, and we hope it continues to feature in discussions about Australia's next generation of housing and tax reform.

CGT debate exposes States’ $11b annual asset giveaway State governments are giving away billions in development rights that create huge private land windfalls, when pricing those rights could fund housing, infrastructure and fairer state taxes.

Australia needs tax reform. But good tax reform should improve incentives, not make them worse.

Prosper Australia’s submission on the Government’s proposed CGT reforms focuses on clear design principles that promote fairness and increase economic equality and opportunity.

While we support the goals of improving housing affordability and intergenerational equity, we believe the package is aimed at the wrong target. The reforms would increase taxes on shares, startups and productive business investment while leaving many of the tax advantages enjoyed by property investors largely intact.

The bigger opportunity is to shift the tax burden away from work and productive investment and towards economic rents. That means reducing property tax concessions, capturing planning-created land windfalls, and using the revenue to lower income taxes.

Our submission argues that if governments are serious about housing affordability and economic productivity, they need to tackle the tax treatment of land rather than further discouraging investment in businesses that create jobs, innovation and growth.

Read the full submission on our website:
https://www.prosper.org.au/2026/06/submission-treasury-laws-amendment-tax-reform-no-1-bill-2026-and-income-tax-rates-amendment-tax-reform-no-1-bill-2026/

Housing affordability is often discussed through statistics, policies and economic models.

Common Wealth tells the human story behind those numbers.

Prosper Australia is proud to support the distribution of this new Australian documentary, which explores why housing has become increasingly unaffordable and what can be done to create a fairer system.

We'll be joining screenings around the country over the coming weeks, with opportunities to hear from the filmmakers, policy experts and community advocates working on housing reform.

Rayna will be speaking at:

📍 Canberra – 25 June, alongside Kane Guglielmi, David Pocock and Katherine Trebeck

📍 Melbourne – 14 July, alongside Kane Guglielmi and Thomas Walker

Our colleague Emily Sims will also be joining the Coffs Harbour screening on 24 June.

If you've been following the housing debate and want to dig deeper into the forces shaping Australia's housing system, we encourage you to come along.

More screening events are being announced soon. Check out the trailer and screening details below.

Common Wealth film screenings | Prosper Australia Prosper is proud to support a compelling new documentary, Common Wealth. Find out about screenings, Q&A's, and other events across the country. See you there!

ICYMI: Last week, we released a new report on one of the biggest public giveaways hiding in plain sight: development rights.

If governments literally created a whole new strip of land and handed it to private landowners for free, there would be a public outcry.

But we effectively do the same thing — vertically — every day through rezoning and planning approvals that can be worth millions overnight.

The difference? Because it happens “in the air” rather than across the ground, we barely notice it.

Our research estimates that governments are giving away around $11 billion worth of publicly created development rights every year.

These rights are a valuable public asset and remain the community's property until they are privatised through a development permit.

Which raises a simple question: why are we giving it away for free?

If we want better infrastructure, more affordable housing, and fairer tax systems, we need to start putting a proper price on giveaways of public assets.

READ THE REPORT: https://www.prosper.org.au/development_rights/

Australia is giving away around $11 billion every year in publicly created development rights to major landowners

Meanwhile, Australians are struggling with housing affordability.

Our new report, Pricing Development Rights, argues that when governments create enormous land value through rezoning and planning approvals, the public should receive a fair return.

By failing to price these rights, governments across Australia are effectively giving away $11 billion a year to major landowners.

The ACT has operated a version of this system for more than 50 years. And it works.

If applied nationally, the revenue could:
• abolish stamp duty for first home buyers
• help fund almost 200,000 additional social homes
• reduce reliance on taxes that punish productive work

This is about fairness, efficiency, and ending a hidden transfer of wealth that rewards speculation over productive development.

Housing help should go to the have-nots — not the have-lots.

Read the report:
https://www.prosper.org.au/development_rights