The Georgist Movement in Australia --
Prospects for the Future

Clyde Cameron

[ An address delivered at the official opening of the new headquarters of the Henry George League, Melbourne. Reprinted from Progress, November, 1972]


Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

This is an historic occasion, far more important than any of us present realise as we stand or sit here tonight. I say stand or sit because, in officially declaring this building open, I want to describe the meeting for the purposes of the record. Tonight, thanks to modern technology, all that we're saying is being recorded. Our voices will be heard in another hundred years or two hundred years or three hundred years to come. Students of the Georgist philosophy will sit around their tape recorders or whatever it is that plays the recording we are taping tonight, fascinated by what happened here. For their benefit I want to describe the scene.

The meeting tonight is in a small room. Perhaps when the historians listen to the tape the room may not be here any more. It is not a very large room but it's packed with people. There's not a seat empty. They're sitting right around the side. At the back I can see people standing. Looking in through the door on the left people are standing, indicating that there's not enough room for all those who want to come into the room to do so. ! Present are very young people which I think is quite encouraging to us. Those present are, or appear to be, serious-minded people. We have with us an endorsed Liberal candidate for a State seat in Councillor Morris Williams. We have Dr. Ken Grigg sitting there in the front seat with his tape recorder to get his own private version of what's Being said. I want to pay my tribute to Dr. Grigg for the enormous amount of work which he has carried out on behalf of the Henry George League. He is a great writer of letters. Nearly everyone of importance in the Labour Party has received letters from him about the taxation of Unimproved Land Values and on Proportional Representation.

This is a very fine building. It's ironic to have to record that the building is ours because of the very evil which we have sought to destroy - the collection by private people of the unearned increment of land. I don't know whether it is your intention, Mr. Pitt, to do so, but if you haven't thought of it I hope you will offer a copy of the tape recording to the National Library in Canberra to be preserved for all times in the archives.

Personal Background

My interest in the Henry George Movement goes back to my family when I was quite a very young person still going to primary school. The first person who introduced my family to the teaching of Henry George was a man called Henry Frick, from the West Coast of South Australia. I'd like to mention at this stage that two people have come all the way from Port Lincoln^ on the West Coast of South Australia to be present at this function tonight. I welcome them and think this indicates the fervour and great zeal which Georgians feel for their philosophy that they should have seen fit to have travelled all the way from Port Lincoln to be here tonight, on this historic occasion. Mr. Pitt says there is also someone here from Esperance in Western Australia. The South Australians will remember Harry Frick. They will know his name. If they don't know him personally they'll remember Jim Moore, certainly remember Sam Lindsay, who was the one who came to our place in the Griffiths Brothers tea van selling tea, but at the same time selling copies of Progress & Poverty and The Perplexed Philosopher and Condition of Labour and The Science of Political Economy and Protection or Free Trade, and all the other literature of the Henry George League. They'll remember Jack Craigie, who represented Flinders in the House of Assembly in the South Australian Parliament for many years.

Jack Craigie

It's my melancholy obligation to have to admit that it was the preferences of my party which put Jack Craigie out of Parliament. Certainly it wasn't my doing. I wasn't a member of the Executive that decided to do so on the recommendation of its Chairman, whose only complaint against Craigie was that he had spoken for four hours against compulsory teaching of religion in State Schools. He did not understand anything about unearned increment or free trade or proportional representation, but he felt that he ought to be put out of the parliament for that reason.

Craigie lived for many years after that, and he was a very great man. He was Secretary of the Henry George League in South Australia right up until the time of his death. He was a regular orator in the Botanical Gardens in Adelaide. He was always looked upon in the parliament as the greatest debater the Parliament of South Australia had ever seen. It's a great thing that tonight's historic occasion gives me the opportunity to place on record in a way that will never be forgotten that Craigie really was a very great figure -- I think really the greatest man of this century, and it is a tragedy that he was not given the opportunity to play a more important role in the politics of our country.

We're going through a period in Australia today when the truths espoused by Henry George are becoming so manifest that I believe people are going to be much more receptive to the philosophy of Henry George than they have ever been. The rising price of land which is plaguing the pockets of so many young people. The astronomical prices of land now being paid in the suburbs for the right to build a house on a small block of land is creating the kind of climate that makes a rejuvenation of the Henry George philosophy a certainty. It's a great thing that we've had a small band of courageous men and women -- I use the word courageous advisedly because it has needed great courage to fight the great fight against the great odds that appear to have confronted us. A great thing that there have been people prepared to stick it out and to men like you, Mr. Pitt, and to men like Mr. Hutchinson, Mr. Huie, and other great men and women such as Mrs. Ellis -- and others -- too many to mention by name here tonight, who have just simply stuck on with a doggedness that means that instead of the Henry George League just becoming a part of history it is still alive and still a very real and important thing.

Canberra

In Canberra we have an example of what happens when first principles are rejected or ignored or not understood.

What they did do was to block the leasehold system which Burley Griffin and Fisher and Hughes intended should apply in the Capital Territory. So that now if you want to buy a building block in Canberra you have to pay anything from $2,000 to $8,000./I think the average price is $4,000. Now this is a great worry to the people in Canberra, and a few weeks back I said to Mr. Kep Enderby (who is the Labour Member for the A.C.T.): "Why don't you put up the proposition that instead of having an auction to sell the lease and people having to find up to $8,000 for a block of land, we should auction the rent and that you bid for how much land rent you'll pay each week for the right to have the exclusive possession of that particular portion of the community's property." He said: "You're a freak -- that's a brilliant idea. How on earth did you ever think of that?"

Well, I honestly wish that I could claim to be the author of that great idea, but I can't. In fact Henry, George probably couldn't claim to be the author of it. But to Enderby's great credit, three weeks ago on his regular weekly broadcast over the local commercial television station in Canberra, he advocated this proposition and the response was quite remarkable. He was inundated with people who said: "You are a freak. You are a genius. Why hasn't someone like Cameron or those bright fellows who have been in Parliament longer than you, haven't thought of it?" And he's been so encouraged by the response that he now is putting it to me: "Do you think that we could refund to all those who've paid cash to get on to their blocks of land since the Gorton system has operated? Refund their cash to them and put them on a weekly rental basis?" Now I'm certain that that would be a very popular proposition. Who wouldn't want their $8,000 back in cash? And to be able to go on merely paying the weekly ground rent.

How To Rectify

The great mistake made in Canberra was that no one at the time the Territory was settled realised that the growth of Canberra would be so great; that a 20-year re-assessment was unreal and was too long between assessments. It should have been an annual assessment, and with computerisation it would be so simple to have an annual assessment of the ground rent. And it's not known except to real estate agents and land valuers that it is so easy to assess the value of the land. It's so easy to deduct the value of the house from the total value or market price under our existing system of the land and house combined to work out what the land is worth. And so Kep Enderby is now a great convert to this system. What he wants to see is the new suburbs of Canberra opened up serviced and enough blocks offered to cater for everybody who is in the market for a block so that the annual rental in the beginning will not be very great because you won't be capitalising on shortage. You will be providing an annual rental that will be equivalent to the true economic rent of the land. And if we can get enough new suburbs established in Canberra on this new system of auctioning the rent - the weekly or annual rent for the land - then the inflated value of the old suburbs will start to go down without any need to buy out or compensate anybody for the fact that they have invested in a bad coin. We will be able to re-establish the principle of the unimproved land value rental system in the A.C.T. There is nothing like example to be able to make your point. If we can establish it in the A.C.T. again Mr. Uren will be also the Labour Minister in charge of housing and urban development. He is now a confirmed unimproved land values taxation disciple. If we can do it in Canberra then as we establish our new towns - which it is the policy of the Labour Party to do - we will be able to dispose of the blocks pf land in the new towns on the same basis as in Canberra.

At the last Biennial Conference of the Labour Party in the Federal Conference in Launceston, it gave me a' great amount of pleasure and pride indeed that I was able to sit back and listen to my pupil, Tom Uren, put up a very wonderful case to the Conference as to why we should write into our housing policy the proposal for' the leasing of land bought by the Commonwealth for new cities. I find that it's not hard to sell the idea of auctioning the rent of land rather than auctioning the land price.

I talked on Saturday in Brisbane with Mr. Edgerton, the President of the Labour Party in that State, and with Mr. Gough Whitlam about this very question of the re-introduction of the Federal Land Tax. It was one of the worst and most retrograde things that was done when the Government decided to abandon Federal Land Tax to the States. The theory was that we would walk out of the field and then the States could increase ,the amount of Land Tax, but the States did not do that. Yet this is the surest way and the quickest way of reducing the cost of land - the quickest way of dealing with land speculators.

Radical Change

But land speculators alone are not the main or only problem that we have to face. As I said to a meeting of the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Conference today in Melbourne: "If I were dictator of Australia, what I would do is to introduce a system of collecting the unearned increment from land to give to the community that which belongs to the community, leaving sacred to the individual that which belongs to the individual (Applause). I would do this by taxing the unimproved value of land making everybody in the community, whether he be a worker or the owner of a brewery or the owner of an emporium, pay the true economic rent of the land that he has the exclusive possession of, and in return I would relieve from him the present insidious form of taxation which goes under the name of sales tax."

The net result would be that the average worker - the ordinary residential citizen who works for his living - would find that he would be paying a new tax called taxation on the unimproved value of the land that his house occupies but he would be saving each week a sum of money probably four or five times that since he wouldn't have to pay excise and sales tax on the everyday items that he has to purchase. And if we really want to deal with inflation, if we really want to reduce prices, if we really want to put value into the dollar, if we really want to make wages real wages not monetary wages, worth something - the easiest way to do it is to devise some means that will reduce prices. And the easiest way to do that is to substitute for sales tax a tax on the unimproved value of land so that you get a double benefit. You get the benefit of reduced prices because you will not be inflating the price of everything you now have to buy because of the sales tax - because when you put sales tax on an item the consumer doesn't just pay the amount of the sales tax imposed by the Government. He pays a premium upon the amount which the seller, the reseller, the retailer charges for the thing plus the sales tax.

Advantage

But the other advantage, of course, is that by using this form of raising public revenue, you would not only depress but remove completely the capital cost now payable. Land value taxation is the one form of taxation which cannot be passed on. No one is going to pay Myers more for a pound of butter just because Myers have to pay more ground rent for the Bourke Street or Lonsdale Street store than they would have to pay for a pound of butter at Dandenong, where the ground rent is less. It's the one thing that just can't be passed on. Increased income tax can be passed on. Almost any kind of tax that you can dream up can always be passed on but one tax that can't be passed on is the tax on the unimproved value of land.

George's Influence

Now Henry George played a very important role in the Labor movement. The first A.L.P. platform included as its prime objective the collection of the unearned increment of land. Henry George had a series of meetings when he was in Australia. One of them was chaired by Mr. Frank Cotton, who was a prominent member of the Labour Party. He presided at Henry George's Sydney meeting and he was a prominent member of the Australian Workers' Union, and during the course of the history that I'm writing on the Australian Workers' Union, I had occasion to come across a little newspaper published by the Wagga Branch of the Australian Shearers' Union; every fortnight was published the list of Georgian books that you could buy.

I don't know how many times I have read Progress and Poverty or The Condition of Labour or the Perplexed Philosopher (it wasn't his best) or The Science of Political Economy or Protection or Free Trade, but I found that he had an extraordinary way of explaining what things stood for.

Opportunity

Politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Williams and myself will continue to do what we can in our respective fields when the opportunity presents itself. You can't make an opening but the opening is now coming because of the extraordinary things that are happening with the inflated values of land. The extraordinary things that are happening with over-protected "industries are going to make people realise that it is not the answer to go increasing tariffs on industries that are inefficient and that people who must as a consequence pay for them are kept in a state of chronic poverty to do so.

Proportional Representation - not an important thing in the Georgian philosophy; it was a means to an end but it's an important means to an end - is coming. We were able to get Proportional Representation as a system injected into the two most important branches of the Labour Party, N.S.W. and Victoria, and when an attempt was made to get back to the old system of winners take all our good friend, Dr. Grigg, together with the support of the extreme left and the extreme right, was able to have the system adopted here in Victoria so that when we elect our Senate candidates in a year's time it will be in a proportional representation system. My own personal hope is that the day will come when not only will the Senate be elected by Proportional Representation but when the House of Representatives will also. Our President in Queensland, Mr. Edgerton, has just returned from Scandinavia, where they have P.R. They wouldn't have it any other way; neither would the Labour Party in Tasmania. The Prime Minister of Sweden told me in April of this year that the Swedish Social Democrats could not have held Government continually for 40 years without a break, but for the fact that they had a fair and honest system of election. And there is great temptation for a party in office to have dishonest systems of elections, while they are there, forgetting that the time will come when the dishonest systems that were designed to keep them in office will work against them and put them out of office in a way that is dishonest too. When P.R. is adopted for the House of Representatives I believe the truths preached by Henry George so many years ago will begin to become something which public men will not be able to resist, and that's why it's so important that you are maintaining a foothold, a beach-head if you like, but a point from which you can strike out and make the views of George known to the people who will rule our country.

It is a great occasion, a great historic occasion that we celebrate today, and I do hope that from this meeting and from this official function our movement will be able to go from strength to strength and that all that you and Max Hirsch and the forebears of this great movement have done will not be wasted and that ultimately truth will prevail.