In a brainstorm that has leftist central planners around the world salivating, an Australian market analytics firm has proposed that the country start imposing a tax on spare bedrooms. The aim: To ease the country's housing shortage by incentivizing those who have more housing than they "need" to sell and downsize.
Cotality Australia notes that 61% of the country's households comprise just one or two people, yet the housing stock is dominated by three- and four-bedroom homes. Cotality says that, to "fix" this discrepancy, "governments could make it more expensive to have more housing than you need, and cheaper to live in smaller housing."
“It’s perfectly acceptable and desirable for people to have spare bedrooms, [but] you could ask them to pay for it through land tax," Cotality Australia head of research Eliza Owen told the Sydney Morning Herald. "Or you could incentivize them to move on through the abolition of stamp duty or some combination of both." The stamp duty is an Australian tax on property transfers that's paid by buyers. Depending on factors that include location and purpose -- for example, whether the buyer is going to live in the home or use it as an investment -- it usually falls between 3 and 5% of the property's value.
Voices on the Australian right are firing back, among them Alexandra Marshall at The Spectator:
"In the interests of ‘saving the economy’...we’ve witnessed the start of open season on private assets as part of the intellectual discussion to provide equity. The government didn’t just run out of other people’s money, it’s run out of other people’s houses.
It’s not the fault of Australians that the government started importing millions of foreigners into the country or that the government turns a blind eye when millions more refuse to leave after their visa has expired...How wildly unfair and sinister it is to turn around to Australians and say, I see you have an extra bedroom in that house you worked your arse off to pay for… Move or we’ll tax you."
Meanwhile, Australian redistributionists are busy cooking up other means of extracting wealth from homeowners. In a new paper, university professors Peter Siminski and Roger Wilkins assail Australia's capital gains tax exemption for owner-occupied housing, by which the government foregoes the coercive collection of $50 billion a year. They also urge the imposition of a tax on "imputed rental income" -- the value of owning a home and not having to pay rent. In a manifestly Marxist sentence, the academics complain that favorable treatment of owner-occupied housing is "a major driver of inequality, undermining the redistributive role of government."