Australia

Overview

Australia has one of the longest continuous histories of land value taxation of any country. Colonial-era Single Tax and Henry George Leagues sprang up in the two decades after Progress and Poverty (1879), and several Australian colonies and states legislated land taxes on unimproved value in the 1890s — New South Wales' Land and Income Tax Assessment Act of 1895 is a commonly cited early example.[1][2] The federal Parliament went further with the Land Tax Act 1910, a graduated tax on the unimproved value of land introduced by the Fisher Labor government partly to break up large under-used rural holdings; it survived until the Land Tax Abolition Act ended the federal tax in 1952, after which land taxation continued only at state and local level.[2][3] Australia remains a live center of Georgist research today through organisations such as Prosper Australia, and its land-tax history is a major source for the Georgist "taxable capacity" literature — most notably Terence Dwyer's estimate that Australian land and resource rents could fund a large share of government revenue.[4]

Federal Land Tax, 1910–1952

The Land Tax Act 1910 imposed a progressive tax on the unimproved value of land, with a higher rate for absentee owners; a Commissioner of Land Taxation was appointed and about 15,000 returns were assessed in its first year, raising roughly £1.3–1.4 million annually in its early years.[3] A High Court challenge upheld the tax's constitutionality, but valuation disputes were persistently contentious, and by mid-century most primary-production land had been exempted, narrowing the tax's base to urban property before it was abolished federally in 1952/53 — a decision Georgist writer Fred Harrison cites as removing a stabiliser and contributing to Australia's post-war boom-bust cycle.[3][5]

State Land Taxes and Council Rating Today

Land taxes and municipal rates on unimproved (site) value continued at the state and local level after 1952, and by the early 2000s accounted for roughly a quarter of state and local government revenue.[3] Structurally, modern state land tax is an asset-based model: each state and territory levies its own annual tax on a landholder's aggregated unimproved land value, using an increasing marginal-rate schedule, with holdings across multiple properties owned by the same individual — and, in most states, related companies — combined for assessment purposes. Top marginal rates and absentee/foreign-owner surcharges vary by state and change over time (Victoria's general top rate was 2.65% for the 2024 land tax year, with a 4% absentee-owner surcharge on top, having risen in steps from 0.5% in 2016); principal residences, land used for primary production, and charitable land are typically exempt; and the annual assessment ("taxing") date itself differs by state — 31 December in New South Wales and Victoria, 30 June in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania.[8] The Henry Tax Review — Australia's Future Tax System (final report December 2009, released May 2010), commissioned by the federal government — recommended (in its recommendations 51–54) abolishing stamp duties on property transfers and levying land tax on all land using an increasing marginal-rate schedule based on per-square-metre value, arguing land is an efficient tax base because it cannot relocate to escape taxation; the review's land-tax reforms were, however, only partially taken up — the Australian Capital Territory being the main jurisdiction to commit to a multi-decade phase-out of stamp duty in favour of land tax.[6][7] Treasury's own modelling ranks these the most efficient taxes in the country: a 2015 Treasury working paper puts the marginal excess burden of a broad-based land tax at minus 10 cents per dollar of revenue against 72 cents for conveyancing stamp duty, and Victoria's cost-benefit guidance applies a default factor of 1.08 on the ground that land tax is the state's most efficient source (see Deadweight Loss).[15][16]

Victoria's Post-2023 Land Tax Increases and Investor-Exit Claims

Victoria raised land tax substantially from 2024: on top of a general top rate that had already risen from 0.5% (2016) to 2.65% (2024), the state added a temporary COVID-19 debt levy — clawing back an extra $4.7 billion from property investors over four years through higher land taxes — and doubled its absentee-owner surcharge to 4%.[9] The Age reported in June 2024 that ABS lending data showed Victorian investors accounted for only 30.6% of the state's housing loans in April 2024, the lowest investor loan-share of any state compared (New South Wales 40.5%, Queensland 37.6%, South Australia 35.8%, Western Australia 37%), while Victorian first-home-buyer loans were the nation's highest share (24.9%); the article quoted Property Investment Professionals of Australia chair Nicola McDougall attributing the pattern in part to the tax change: "More than most other states, what we are seeing in Victoria is a raft of what investors perceive to be anti-investor policies … at a time of really high interest rates" — reported alongside rising interest rates and other cost pressures as contributing causes, and alongside a PIPA survey finding 24.8% of Melbourne investor-respondents had sold at least one investment property in the twelve months to August 2023, the highest share of any state.[9] An earlier version of this page also attributed to the same Age article a claim of "more than 10,000 fewer active rental-property bonds" and of hundreds of investment-property auctions in Melbourne's northern and outer suburbs; a full reading of the article shows neither figure appears in it, its content being the ABS/PIPA/CoreLogic data cited above. A statewide decline in active rental bonds is independently reported elsewhere in the press — one account puts it at 21,712 in the year to June 2024, said to be the first such decline since bond records began in 1999 — and reporting on investor-property auctions in the northern suburbs (Craigieburn, Reservoir) also circulates, tied in at least one case to Ray White economist Nerida Conisbee rather than to Gordon or The Age; no correctly attributed primary source for those specific figures has been identified, and they are therefore not relied on here. The Property Council of Australia — an industry body representing property owners and developers, not an independent research institute — commissioned Mandala Partners to model the effect on institutional capital; its October 2025 release reported a measured 53% fall in global institutional investment into Victorian property over three years (from over $10 billion to about $5 billion) and projected, as a modeled counterfactual rather than an observed outcome, that halving the absentee-owner surcharge could recover $5.7 billion in investment and roughly 5,900 jobs by 2030.[10] The wiki does not currently carry a dedicated objection page on land-tax-driven capital flight or investment deterrence; this is exactly the kind of countervailing evidence such a page would need to weigh against the capitalization and administrability evidence carried elsewhere on this page and on Land Value Tax.

Windfall Gains Tax (Victoria, 2023–)

Victoria added a second, structurally distinct land-value-capture instrument in 2023: the Windfall Gains Tax (WGT), a betterment levy on the increase in Capital Improved Value that results specifically from government rezoning — a one-off charge (not the annual land tax discussed above), assessed at the moment rezoning takes effect and payable at rates up to 50% of the uplift, with deferral available for up to 30 years or until sale.[11] Unlike the UK's four repealed betterment levies (see the betterment-levy page's UK history), Victoria's WGT has survived intact since commencement — Prosper Australia's long-running Renegade Economists podcast closed its ~600-episode run in 2021 anticipating the tax's passage as vindication of decades of local advocacy.

What the Land Is Worth, and What a Land Tax Could Replace

The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes one of the world's few official national balance sheets that values land separately from what stands on it. At 30 June 2025 it put Australian land at $10,374 billion, of which residential land was $8,317 billion, against $3,247 billion for the dwellings built on that land and a national net worth of $21,413 billion. In 2006 the same series showed land at $2,781 billion and dwellings at $1,158 billion, so land has risen close to fourfold in nineteen years while the building stock has risen less than threefold.[12] New South Wales alone accounts for $3,170 billion of the residential land.[12]

Set against the ABS's own tax statistics for 2024-25, the arithmetic of substitution is simple. State and local governments collected $34.4 billion in stamp duties on conveyances, $20.0 billion in land taxes and $25.1 billion in municipal rates; the Commonwealth collected $143.7 billion in company income tax and $347.1 billion in income tax on individuals.[13] A uniform annual charge of about 0.33% on all land would match conveyance duties; about 1.4% would match company tax; about 3.3% would match personal income tax. These are mechanical ratios on the published totals, before any behavioural response, exemption or transition credit, and they say nothing about incidence or feasibility. They do show the scale of the base: each 0.1 percentage point on residential land alone is roughly $8 billion a year.

The exercise has become a live argument on the Australian right as well as the Georgist left. The Institute of Public Affairs' chief economist and Australian columnist Adam Creighton, delivering the 135th Henry George Oration in Melbourne in September 2026, called land tax "the most unsuccessful great idea in history," ran the same substitution sums, and argued that conservatives who defend property rights should ask "why a worker's next dollar of earnings deserves to be taxed at double-digit rates up to 47 per cent, while the rising value of a site its owner did nothing to create isn't taxed at all practically."[14] His case rests on Friedman's "least bad tax" remark and Churchill's 1909 speeches rather than new evidence, and it is recorded here as a proponent's argument, not as support; its policy hook is the 2023 New South Wales opt-in scheme and its repeal, covered on the New South Wales page.

Significance

Australia's century-plus experience — a working federal land tax, its political abolition, and continuing state-level land taxes and rating on unimproved value — provides one of the most-cited real-world demonstrations of the administrability of land value taxation at scale, and its data underpins later Georgist "taxable capacity" and revenue-adequacy arguments.[4][5] (Present-day land tax rates and thresholds vary by state and change frequently, and are not detailed here.)

See Also

• New South Wales, Australia — the state with the longest-running Australian land tax
• Prosper Australia — Australia's leading Georgist research and advocacy organisation
• The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources (Dwyer) — the key Australian revenue-capacity study
• Land Value Tax — the general policy concept
• Boom-Bust Cycle — Harrison's account of Australia's post-1952 cycle
• Betterment Levy — the instrument family Victoria's Windfall Gains Tax belongs to, contrasted with the UK's four repealed attempts

Sources

1. Henry George School of Social Science / HG Archives, "Land Value Taxation in Australia and New Zealand" — hgarchives.org — used for the spread of Single Tax and Henry George Leagues in colonial Australia in the 1880s–1890s.
2. Wikipedia, "Land value tax in Australia" — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax_in_Australia — used for the 1895 NSW Land and Income Tax Assessment Act and its unimproved-value basis (basic-facts citation).
3. Parliamentary Budget Office (Australia), "1901 to 1950: The early years of Australia's tax system" — pbo.gov.au — used for the Land Tax Act 1910's structure, administration, revenue figures, and the tax's decline and abolition in 1952.
4. This wiki's Dwyer, "The Taxable Capacity of Australian Land and Resources" research page — used for Dwyer's use of Australian land-value data to argue land rents could fund a large share of government revenue.
5. Fred Harrison, Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2005/2010 (Ch. 13 discusses Australia's land-tax experience at length) — used for the claim that Australia's 1952 federal land tax abolition removed a counter-cyclical stabiliser. The specific page citation has not been independently verified against the primary text, so this claim is attributed to Harrison rather than asserted as established fact.
6. Commonwealth of Australia, Australia's Future Tax System: Report to the Treasurer (the "Henry Tax Review," final report December 2009, released 2 May 2010) — Treasury.gov.au final report — the primary source for the review's land-tax recommendations (recommendations 51–54: abolish conveyance stamp duties; levy land tax on all land on a per-holding, per-square-metre marginal-rate basis) and the ACT's partial implementation.
7. Gavin Wood, Rachel Ong, Melek Cigdem & Elizabeth Taylor (2012), The Spatial and Distributional Impacts of the Henry Review Recommendations on Stamp Duty and Land Tax, AHURI Final Report No. 182, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute — AHURI PDF — read in full 2026-08-21; independent academic source summarising the Henry Review's land-tax recommendations (51–54) as the abolition of stamp duties on all property transactions and the levying of land tax on all land via an increasing marginal-rate schedule, confirming the recommendation's wording used above.
8. International Bar Association, "Land Value Tax in Australia" (explainer). ibanet.org/land-value-tax-in-Australia — used for the asset-based state land tax model, the aggregation rule for multi-property and related-company holdings, typical exemptions (principal residence, primary production, charities), and the taxing-date split between states. The article's rate figures (up to ~2.67%, absentee surcharges ~0.75–4%) were corroborated for currency and order of magnitude against Victoria's State Revenue Office published rates (2.65% top general rate and 4% absentee-owner surcharge for the 2024 land tax year, up from 0.5% in 2016); state-by-state brackets are not detailed on this page and are noted as varying and changing frequently.
9. Josh Gordon, "Property investors are fleeing Victoria over soaring land taxes," The Age, published 2024-06-08T19:00 UTC (2024-06-09 morning AEST), updated 2024-06-09T05:00 UTC. theage.com.au — URL, headline, byline, and publish/update timestamps confirmed against the article's own page metadata (og:title, author, article:published_time) and body paragraphs, read from an Internet Archive snapshot (web.archive.org/web/20251112014734) because the live page is paywalled; no syndicated copy was found at smh.com.au. Used for the ABS lending-share data, the McDougall/PIPA quote, the COVID-19 debt levy's $4.7 billion figure, and the PIPA investor-sale survey figures (serious journalistic source; B-claim, measured ABS/industry-survey statistics reported alongside contested causal attribution). The article does not contain the tenancy-bond-count-decline or Melbourne-auction figures previously cited to it here — see the note in the body text above.
10. Property Council of Australia, "Global investors abandon Victoria as land tax surcharges bite" (media release citing a Mandala Partners report), 29 October 2025. propertycouncil.com.au — used for the 53% three-year fall in global institutional investment and the modeled investment/jobs recovery projection from halving the absentee-owner surcharge. Industry-advocacy source (EDITORIAL source-hierarchy class 6); cited to represent the property industry's own position and the report's headline statistic, with the recovery projection flagged as a model output rather than an observed result.
11. Fasiha Rose (PCL Lawyers), "Victorian Property Tax Explained: Windfall Gains Tax (WGT)," Mondaq, 19 August 2026. mondaq.com — read 2026-08-21; used for the WGT's 1 July 2023 commencement, its rezoning-only trigger, rate structure up to 50% of uplift, and the up-to-30-year deferral mechanism (B-claim; full mechanics detailed on the betterment-levy page).
12. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian System of National Accounts, 2024-25, Table 10 (National Balance Sheet) and Table 61 (Value of Land, by Land Use by State/Territory), current prices at 30 June. abs.gov.au — used for the land, residential land, dwellings and net worth values at June 2025 and June 2006 and the NSW residential land value (A-claim; official statistics read from the published spreadsheets).
13. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Taxation Revenue, Australia, 2024-25, released 21 April 2026, Table 1 (Commonwealth) and Table 10 (all states, state and local government). abs.gov.au — used for the 2024-25 conveyance duty, land tax, municipal rates, company income tax and individual income tax totals (A-claim; the substitution ratios in the text are arithmetic on these totals and the land values in source 12).
14. Adam Creighton, "Revive land tax, 'the most unsuccessful great idea' in history," The Australian, 21 September 2026, republished by the Institute of Public Affairs. ipa.org.au — used for the Henry George Oration, the quoted passages and the framing of the New South Wales reversal (B-claim; an op-ed by a journalist and think-tank economist, Tier 2 under §4c, cited as proponent only; its ABS figures were checked against sources 12 and 13, and its revenue figures differ slightly from the ABS totals used here).
15. Liangyue Cao et al. (2015), Understanding the economy-wide efficiency and incidence of major Australian taxes, Treasury Working Paper 2015-01. treasury.gov.au — used for the land-tax and stamp-duty marginal excess burdens (A-claim; official body).
16. Leo Dobes, Joanne Leung & George Argyrous (2016), "Appendix 7: Deadweight economic loss caused by raising revenue for projects and programs," in Social Cost-Benefit Analysis in Australia and New Zealand, ANU Press, pp. 203–212. PDF — used for Victoria's default factor of 1.08 and its stated rationale (B-claim; peer-reviewed open-access monograph).