450 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION P. 



Section F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 

 President of the Section. — The Hon. W. Pember Reeves. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 31. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



Land, Taxes in Australasia. 



Ought I to apologise for opening this session with an address of a local rather 

 than a general character? I am not sure. At any rate, I can plead that the 

 locality is a wide one. The largest feature of Australia and New Zealand 

 is their territory, and with that territory the subject of this address is directly 

 concerned. It is true that I am asking you to consider the experiments of a 

 white population of but five millions and a half. But the interest of experi- 

 ments is not limited by the numbers of the men who make them. The poten- 

 tialities of Australasia are really great. Distance and climatic difficulties in the 

 case of Australia, distance and a broken surface in the case of New Zealand, 

 are mainly responsible for limiting the increase of population to, say, a hundred 

 thousand a year. But though one-third of Australia and, perhaps, one-seventh 

 of New Zealand are hopeless desert or impracticable country, almost valueless 

 save for minerals, still that leaves immense expanses that will carry people, and 

 carry people ever less sparsely as the decades go on. * Because Australasia does 

 not fill up at the pace of North America, we are not to suppose that her com- 

 munities are not growing and will not grow. The experimental laws of which I 

 am to speak may, and I think will, affect the destinies of considerable and highly 

 civilised nations at the Antipodes. Moreover, we live in days when the states- 

 men of distant countries are quick to take hints from each other's successes. 

 If these Australasian land-taxing laws should in the next twenty years achieve 

 the objects of their framers, it will be odd if they are not imitated in more 

 countries than one. 



What are these objects? The primary object of every Government in im- 

 posing taxation is supposed to be to raise revenue. Certainly this has been one 

 of the aims of the colonial land-taxers. In the case of some of them, notably of 

 those who imposed the land tax of New South Wales, it was their chief aim. 

 But for the most part revenue has not been their chief object. Most of the land 

 taxes have been, and are, policy taxes, put on with the avowed intention of 

 sharply stimulating the subdivision of land. It is this unconcealed aim, this 

 political and economic intention, which gives them their interest to students. 

 They are the chosen weapons of the progressive and labour parties in their battle 

 against latifundia. This is not the arena to discuss whether they are fair or 

 unfair, justifiable or unjustifiable, weapons. At any rate I do not mean to con- 

 sider them from that standpoint. I propose to say something very briefly of the 

 conditions which stirred popular opinion to bring them about ; of their rates and 

 incidence; and of their success or failure as instruments for combating what 

 their friends call land monopoly. The taxes to which I shall refer are those im- 

 posed by the States of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western 

 Australia, that of the Dominion of New Zealand, and last, but not least, the new 

 Federal tax of the Commonwealth of Australia. These do not by any means 

 entirely represent the annual sum exacted from real property in the seven 

 Colonies. The State Government of Tasmania levies a tax on real property. 



