LAND VALUES

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3215, 11 August 1932, Page 2

LAND VALUES

, THE POSITION IN VICTORIA. In the course of a considered statement summarised in the Argus of July 22, the Chamber of Manufactures (Melbourne) set out the disabilities of the secondary industries in the present economic crisis. As with primary industries, costs of production are said to be far too high for the manufacturers to make both ends meet, and an analysis is made of the causes of these costs. The high price of coal and interest paid by primary producers on inflated land values are taken as the principal basic elements governing the costs of production. High land values mean high cost of raw material. Fertile as land itself may be, the subject of land when it comes to economic theories is even moi*e fertile. Many strange conclusions have been drawn from so-called high land

values. It is not claimed that the conclusion of the Chamber of Manufactures is unsound, but it might be argued that the Australian Customs policy is a far more potent cause of swollen costs all round than are the land values. Also in the Argus of July 22 appeared a report of an appeal lodged by a property owner at the court at Wagga (New South Wales) against the valuation of his property on the ground that the value be increased. It is a rare thing for a land-owner to ask for a higher valuation of his property, but that is the other side of the picture. The tendency to depress land values unduly is causing trouble. It is making finance on land securities more difficult for one thing, and is responsible for much embarrassment in other directions. No one will dispute that land values have been too high, but conditions have lowered them, in some cases, down to the levels which ruled

in 1914, and it is not easy to see that values in general, as they stand at present, comprise one of the principal causes of high manufacturing costs.