Prosper Australia

Overview

Prosper Australia, with roots reaching back to 1890, is Australia's foremost Georgist research and advocacy organisation. Operating from Melbourne, it has kept land value taxation a live policy issue in a country with an unusually strong land-tax tradition.

Work

• Total Resource Rents of Australia (2013) — Karl Fitzgerald's line-by-line national rent inventory (23.6% of GDP), the modern movement's most-cited revenue-capacity study and the methodological template for Common Wealth Canada's 2023 Canadian counterpart.
• Speculative Vacancies research — Prosper's long-running report series measures empty housing in Melbourne from water-meter data rather than survey or listing counts. The 11th report (2024) found 5.2% of Melbourne dwellings vacant or barely used in 2023 — one in twenty homes — equivalent to more than two and a half years of new construction sitting idle, and argues vacancy is only "the tip of the iceberg" of broader land banking by developers.
• Advocacy and education — it campaigns for land value taxation and against property-speculation subsidies, and (through its outreach arm Earthsharing) ran the Renegade Economists radio show and podcast — roughly 600 episodes on Melbourne community station 3CR from September 2007 to November 2021, closing on the passage of Victoria's Windfall Gains Tax — plus a structured 12-part Georgist Podcourse introducing land and rent economics.

Prosper's research lineage runs through the Land Values Research Group, which by the organisation's own account was formed in Melbourne after the Canadian land economist H. Bronson Cowan's 1943 research visit to the municipalities of Brunswick and Camberwell. Its founding director, the engineer Allan R. Hutchinson (1907–1988), published some 37 studies, chiefly comparisons of site-value rating with systems that tax buildings; the valuer Bryan Kavanagh succeeded him in 1988 and built the property-turnover-to-GDP barometer; and Gavin Putland, hired by Prosper in 2003, took the directorship in 2008, when the group was formalised as Prosper's research arm with a paid director. Its patrons spanned the parties — the Whitlam-era Labor minister Clyde Cameron and the Menzies-era Liberal minister Sir Allen Fairhall. The group's claims for site-value rating are its own; the independent test on the wiki is Edwards's 1984 study.[5]

Significance

Prosper Australia is a model of evidence-driven Georgist advocacy, supplying original empirical research (notably on vacancy) that few other organisations produce.

See Also

• Speculative Vacancies 11: Empty Homes in Melbourne — the 2023/2024 vacancy findings in depth
• Renegade Economists Podcast · The Georgist Podcourse (Earthsharing) — Prosper's outreach programming
• Karl Fitzgerald — Prosper's longtime researcher and Renegade Economists host
• New South Wales, Australia · Land Monopoly · Land Value Tax

Sources

1. Prosper Australia — official site and Speculative Vacancies reports. prosper.org.au — used for the organisation's history, its advocacy work, and its speculative-vacancy research methodology and findings.
2. Prosper Australia (2024), Speculative Vacancies 11: Empty Homes in Melbourne 2019–2023 — used for the 5.2%/one-in-twenty 2023 vacancy figure and the land-banking argument (B-claim, advocacy research with a transparent, benchmarkable method). wiki summary
3. Karl Fitzgerald, Renegade Economists (radio show/podcast), September 2007 – November 2021, 3CR Melbourne — used for the ~600-episode run and its closing on Victoria's Windfall Gains Tax (A-claim). wiki summary
4. Karl Fitzgerald, "The Georgist Podcourse," Earthsharing Australia blog, 3 May 2019 — used for the 12-part course format (A-claim). wiki summary
5. Prosper Australia, "Land Values Research Group" (organisational history page, undated). prosper.org.au — used for Cowan's 1943 visit, Hutchinson's directorship and output, the 1988 and 2008 successions, the 2008 formalisation and the patrons (A-claim for facts about the organisation itself, as its own account; its characterisations of the research as "world-leading" are advocacy and are not carried). The page gives no explicit founding year for the group.