Wow, that's pretty complicated, a lot of moving parts.

It sounds similar to ours, the purpose of land tax anyway. It goes towards paying for public services like education, health and public safety.

Ours is a little simpler in that there's one basic way of determining it.

A person's primary residence is exempt, all other property is subject to it. Site Value (SV) must be $280,000 or more to incur the tax and one must have $450,000 of value in total SV to be subject to the tax. Multiple properties are aggregated.

So, if you have three properties with SV's of $400,000, none of which are your primary residence you don't pay. Once over $450,000 you pay. This is for commercial, rural, industrial, residential etc. The Valuer General assesses the SV and it changes, mostly upwards as years go by.

There are different rates for properties owned in a Trust and not. I'll not get into that though.

As an example:

• Non-Trust held single property (not primary residence) with SV of $500,000 = $250 land tax payable annually.
• Non-Trust held multiple properties (not primary residence) with aggregated SV of $1,000,000 = $4827.50 payable.
• Same as above but SV of $2,000,000 land tax = $27037.50

This is for my State only, each has their own laws around land tax. My State is the highest in the country though.

The idea is it penalises the people they feel can afford it most, although that thinking is a little skewed in my personal and professional opinion.

Anyway, it's a complicated subject. Thanks for enlightening me about what goes on up your way.