Karl Fitzgerald

Overview

Karl Fitzgerald is an Australian Georgist campaigner, researcher, and broadcaster, for many years the most visible public voice of Prosper Australia and its associated body Earthsharing Australia.

Contributions

• Speculative Vacancies research. Fitzgerald led Prosper's pioneering speculative vacancy studies, using water-consumption data to reveal how much housing sits deliberately empty in Melbourne — original empirical work that few others have matched and that fed into the case for vacancy taxes.
• Total Resource Rents of Australia. He authored Total Resource Rents of Australia (2013), an estimate of the economic rent from land and natural resources available as a public revenue base — carried, with caveats, on this wiki's land rent could fund government page.
• Real Estate 4 Ransom. He co-directed (with Gavin Emmanuel) the 2012 documentary Real Estate 4 Ransom, shot over five years, which reads the global financial crisis as substantially a land-speculation crisis — the Georgist movement's most-circulated film.
• Renegade Economists. He hosted the long-running Renegade Economists radio show and podcast (600+ episodes), bringing land-tax, banking, and monopoly analysis to a broad Australian audience.
• Advocacy and media. Through Prosper and Earthsharing he has been a tireless populariser of Georgist economics, and his work anchors the modern Australian strand of geoism.

Significance

Fitzgerald's combination of original empirical research (speculative vacancies, resource-rent estimation) and sustained popular media (film and a 600-episode podcast) made Prosper Australia one of the most productive Georgist organisations of the early 21st century and kept land-value taxation a live topic in Australian policy debate.

See Also

• Prosper Australia · Speculative Vacancy · Earthsharing Australia · Total Resource Rents of Australia · Real Estate 4 Ransom

Sources

1. Renegade Economists podcast / Prosper Australia radio — used for his broadcasting role (A-claim; organizational self-description). prosper.org.au/radio
2. Karl Fitzgerald (2013), Total Resource Rents of Australia — used for the TRRA authorship (A-claim). Full research page on this wiki: Total Resource Rents of Australia; the estimate is also carried, with caveats, on land rent could fund government. PDF
3. Real Estate 4 Ransom (2012 documentary), dir. Karl Fitzgerald & Gavin Emmanuel — used for his co-direction credit and the film's argument (A-claim). Wiki page: real-estate-4-ransom. Prosper Australia