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 pioneering studies use water-usage and other data to estimate how much housing sits deliberately vacant, documenting the speculative withholding of land and property that LVT is designed to discourage.
• Advocacy and education — it campaigns for land value taxation and against property-speculation subsidies, and (through its outreach arm Earthsharing) ran the Renegade Economists podcast and Georgist courses.

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

• 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.