New South Wales, Australia

Overview

New South Wales, Australia, has levied a land tax since 1895, giving it one of the longest continuous histories of land taxation anywhere.[3] Australia more broadly has a deep Georgist tradition: George's ideas arrived early and influentially, and several Australian states and local councils have long taxed land values (often rating on unimproved land value). NSW is one of the country's flagship cases in the standard comparative reference, Land Value Taxation Around the World (Andelson, ed., 2001).[2]

Origins: The 1895 Act

NSW's land tax was introduced through the Land and Income Tax Assessment Act 1895, carried in the Legislative Assembly by the free-trade Premier and Treasurer George Houstoun Reid and assented on 12 December 1895.[3] It was enacted at the high-water mark of Georgist "single tax" agitation in the Australasian colonies, and — consistent with that influence — the tax was struck on the unimproved value of land, deliberately exempting buildings and other improvements.

The System

NSW's state land tax is assessed on the unimproved value (also called land value) of land: the value of the site itself, excluding buildings or other improvements.[4] This is the same site-value base that distinguishes a land value tax from a tax on land plus structures. Local councils in parts of Australia have likewise rated on land value rather than total property value. Because the system has run for over a century, NSW supplies unusually clean evidence on the administrative durability of land valuation at scale.

That evidence is strong. A review of Australian and New Zealand practice by Hefferan & Boyd (2010) reports that formal objection rates against issued valuations run "well below the internationally accepted 2%, with many jurisdictions encountering less than 1%" — the revealed-acceptance evidence that taxpayers, in practice, treat these land assessments as reliable.[5] The same review finds value-based property taxes aggregate about 9.1% of total Australian tax revenue.[5] These findings are a central rebuttal to the objection that land value cannot be assessed accurately.

2023: First Home Buyer Choice and Its Repeal

For six months in 2023 New South Wales ran the closest thing Australia has had to a live transition from stamp duty to a recurrent land tax on owner-occupied housing. Under the Property Tax (First Home Buyer Choice) Act 2022, which commenced on 16 January 2023, first-home buyers of a home worth up to $1.5 million (or vacant land up to $800,000) could elect, instead of paying transfer duty, an annual property tax of $400 plus 0.3% of land value for a home they lived in, or $1,500 plus 1.1% of land value for an investment property, with the liability running until they sold.[7] The scheme was the Perrottet Coalition government's opt-in route toward its stated goal of replacing transfer duty with a land-value charge over time.

The Minns Labor government elected in March 2023 closed the scheme to contracts exchanged after 30 June 2023, replacing it from 1 July with a higher transfer-duty exemption threshold ($800,000, with a concession to $1 million) and letting existing participants keep paying property tax until they sold.[8] Press reports put uptake at almost 5,000 properties by May 2023.[9] The episode is short but instructive on two counts. It shows that an optional, buyer-by-buyer transition avoids the wealth-shock objection to a sudden switch, since nobody who had already paid duty was charged twice; and it shows the political weakness of the same design, which a new government could shut with one budget measure because the tax's future revenue was not yet anyone's entrenched expectation. The columnist Adam Creighton, in the 2026 Henry George Oration and a subsequent op-ed, has called the reversal "the most disappointing policy change this century" in Australian tax; that is a proponent's judgment, recorded on the Australia page alongside the balance-sheet arithmetic he uses to make it.

Significance

Australia, and NSW in particular, provides a long-run real-world demonstration that recurrent land value taxation is stable, administrable, and politically survivable — a durability that contrasts with the repeatedly-repealed event-based betterment levies of the UK. It sits alongside the wiki's other long-standing land-tax jurisdictions — New Zealand's land-value rating, Denmark's grundskyld, and Estonia's land tax — as comparative evidence for land-only taxation at scale.

NSW also remains a centre of Georgist research and advocacy through organisations like Prosper Australia (roots to 1890), whose Total Resource Rents of Australia (2013) is the modern movement's most-cited national rent inventory, and its ecological outreach arm Earthsharing Australia.

See Also

• Australia — the national land-tax history (1895 state taxes, 1910–1952 federal land tax, Henry Tax Review) that NSW's tax sits within
• Land Value Tax · Site Value — the tax and its unimproved-value base
• Prosper Australia · Earthsharing Australia — the advocacy and research institutions
• New Zealand · Denmark · Estonia — the other long-standing land-tax jurisdictions
• Hefferan & Boyd, mass appraisal in Australia · Objection: land can't be assessed — the assessability evidence
• Land Value Taxation Around the World (Andelson) — the comparative survey
• Objection: LVT transition creates a wealth shock — the objection an opt-in transition such as First Home Buyer Choice is designed to sidestep

Sources

1. Wiki corpus, Site Value — used for NSW assessing its land tax on unimproved (land) value, the site-value base distinction, and the "administrative durability over more than a century" framing (which cites Revenue NSW).
2. Robert Andelson (ed., 2001), Land-Value Taxation Around the World — wiki summary — used for NSW as a flagship Australian case in the standard country-by-country LVT survey.
3. Land and Income Tax Assessment Bill/Act 1895 (NSW), Parliament of New South Wales bill record — Bill details, pk=7750. Verified 2026-07-11 — used for the 1895 introduction of NSW land taxation, the carriage/introduction by George Houstoun Reid, and the 12 December 1895 assent date. A new source for this wiki, not yet in sources/registry.csv.
4. Revenue NSW, "What is land tax?" — page (via Site Value, source 8) — used for NSW basing land tax on "unimproved land values … excluding buildings or other improvements."
5. Mike Hefferan & Terry Boyd (2010), "Property taxation and mass appraisal valuations in Australia," Journal of Property Investment & Finance 28(3): 233–248 — wiki summary — used for the sub-2%/sub-1% objection-rate benchmark and the 9.1%-of-tax-revenue figure for value-based property taxes.
6. Prosper Australia — wiki page — used for current Australian land-tax research and advocacy context (advocacy source, attributed).
7. Revenue NSW, "First Home Buyer Choice guide" (previous schemes). revenue.nsw.gov.au — used for the Act's 16 January 2023 commencement, the $400 + 0.3% and $1,500 + 1.1% rates, the $1.5 million and $800,000 caps, the 30 June 2023 contract cut-off and the continuing liability of those who opted in (A-claim; official administering agency).
8. NSW Government, "More first home buyers paying no tax under Minns Government," media release, 22 May 2023. nsw.gov.au — used for the closure of the scheme from 1 July 2023, the $800,000 exemption and $1 million concession thresholds, and the grandfathering of existing participants (A-claim; official statement of the government's own policy).
9. ABC News, "NSW government set to abolish first home buyer land tax choice," 22 May 2023. abc.net.au — used for the "almost 5,000 properties" uptake figure (B-claim; news reporting of an official figure, no final count located in an official publication).