Well Ross, if new home buyers aren’t going to pay these taxes, who is??

This tax money goes to local councils, state and federal governments, which then gets turned back into the community in the form of services and infrastructure.

New housing requires new roads and all manner of services and infrastructure. So shouldn’t the purchasers of these new houses pay the lion’s share of the taxes that provide for these things?

Why should established citizens have to fork out for the constant implementation of services and infrastructure in new suburbs, from which they draw no benefit at all?

If this tax burden helps to slow down the property market, isn’t that a good thing?

I’d say that it is, in many places, where local councils have battled to keep up with the demand for new services and infrastructure as a result of the demand for new houses.

Yes it is unfortunate that the cost of housing is so burdensome to young people. But really, it does make more sense for them to pay the associated taxes rather than raising taxes and rates for the established community.

Now, if we really wanted to lower houses prices, and at the same time slow urban sprawl and urban consolidation, what should we do?

Simple. Address the demand factor….. and reduce immigration right down to a small fraction of its current record-high level.

Ross, you started your article with::

< Housing starts continue to slide to record lows and the HIA and other groups warn of worsening supply shortages but the taxation approach to new housing seems to escape policy attention. >

And finished with::

< A similar approach to more equitable taxation of housing, if adopted more broadly by governments state and local, might just achieve the sort of stimulus that wasted millions of grants and incentives have failed to deliver. >

So I assume that the most important thing to you is stimulation of the market. That is; more houses, ongoing, with no end in sight. Just forever more!

I pulled you up on this before – you are looking only at one side of the equation and completely ignoring the other side. You are looking at the supply side and just totally pandering to the demand side, without a thought that maybe, just maybe, the real answer to the housing dilemma is to address the demand side…… and start strongly lobbying for a big reduction in population growth… which can be easily achieved by reducing immigration.

But I guess you’ll never do this because you’d run into a real conflict between more houses at high prices meaning more profits for you and your fraternity, and less houses at a lower demand meaning less sales and lower profit margins.

So where does that leave you? Are you genuinely concerned about new home buyers and the burden they must bear in order to purchase a home? Or is it just a case of weasel words, and what you really want is just plain stimulation of the property market, for your own vested interests?

Just asking. But your lack of any consideration of the demand side of the equation does point strongly to the latter.

Ross I am quite happy to consign your industry to the dump of history, particularly if it means we can stop the growth of population in our district, & indeed the nation. Development has been bad enough for our lifestyle, without me having to pay for the privilege of getting even more citified people around here.

20 years ago I invested $14,000 in supplying my property & family with drinking & irrigation water. My system works well. The last thing I would want to do is to pay to bring in town water for the new chums, pay to use what I don't want, then not be allowed to use it by way of restrictions, when it is dry enough to actually want it. If you want it, you pay for it.

When I was the foundation rural watch coordinator for our road I had 12 homes. Now after development we have 3 coordinators servicing the 64 homes. Where it was once safe to have kids ride a bike or horse, or even walk a dog, it is now unwise to let preteens out alone on the road.

Our narrow country roads, adequate for the traffic in the past, are now jammed with the 3/400% increase in traffic. Worse, on the single lane back roads, our immigrants from the city now expect our kids in their light cars to move right off the bitumen so they, in their $100,000 4WD, can keep their tyres clean. Fat chance.

So Ross if you want to contaminate our nice rural area with your lousy city, you pay for it. I don't mind you making a living, but would you please pi55 off & do it somewhere else. The hide of you expecting us to pay to help you pollute our area is really a bit rich.
Continued

Conversely, I do feel sorry for so many your customers, sold the dream of acreage living. Perhaps the majority find the expectation was far greater than the realisation. There is a huge glut of new housing on the market, as these city folk are desperate to scuttle back into the concrete jungle where they are more at home. All this fresh air, & so much grass to mow, really is a bit much for them.

Yes, it is an imbecile's dilemma?
Imbecilic, inasmuch as it is the result one would expect if the inmates were running the asylum; and hell bent on widening the gap between the haves and have nots, privatising the best most profitable assets, and or, trying to eliminate every inherently fair aspect of socialism from our economy?
Imbecilic, inasmuch we introduced things like negative gearing, which puts more money into the fullest pockets and rips more out of those already near empty.
There was a time when we the community dipped into our pockets and paid a premium, that paid for more than just services.
We paid for expansion, knowing that this would produce more rate payers, who would then share and reduce a common burden through economies of scale.
We need to take a good long look at the inherently unfair American model and what it has actually produced? And then stop slavishly following it!
We need quite massive tax reform and simplification!
We need to eliminate all the non productive and parasitical practises from our economy, so that things we could once easily afford are returned to us!
We need to eliminate the non productive paper shuffling middleman profit taker. The NBN will assist that worthy goal; given, direct from factory to you marketing could halve the cost of living, seriously boost local manufacture; and for the very first time, put applied downward pressure on the endless imbecilic price wage spiral and or the downward race toward the lowest common denominator.
We need to seriously rationalise govt and govt services, to eliminate public service empire building, duplication and services costing far more than the natural cost.
We need to place a much larger capital gains on entirely unproductive land bank property investment.
We need to roll out rapid rail, and then rezone some of the resumed land as urban. The sales of this land, would then repay in full all the necessary capital outlays, all while returning equability and affordability to the new housing market!
Rhrosty.

Ross, Most here more than likely purchased their homes before the imposition of these inflated big government taxes, charges ,levies and outright rip offs and are now in happy land after pocketing the inflated proceeds, and selfishly want the youth of our country to some how not aspire to what their parents have. Infrastructure, which includes roads, power, water, sewerage and parkland etc is bourn by the developer and is not included in these costs. Hello.