Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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Bob Keall has also proposed taxes on many other natural resources other than land
that are in limited supply. After local authorities progressively introduced uniform
annual charges for water, sewage and refuse, which make up a growing percentage
of local authority revenue, Keall turned his attention from land taxes to taxes on
the other natural monopolies. These monopolies, or commons, include, he says:
‘rights to land, water, airwaves, minerals, fisheries, hydro­power generation and
supply, any public utility such as a port, airport or the monopolistic right to
reticulate wires, pipes, rails, roads and the like; even the right to pollute’. 11 This
would mean, for instance, the introduction of a resource rental tax on fishing
quotas and a carbon tax. The imposition of resource taxes will encourage the
production of more durable products and reuseable packaging, as well as the use
of recycled materials.
Such taxes, Keall says, would also neatly circumvent the problem of
reacquiring state assets that were sold under previous governments. Writing to the
New Zealand Herald in 1996, Bob Keall said:
‘It is not necessary for any government to repurchase any state asset, natural
resource, natural monopoly or public utility in order to achieve exactly the same
end. Charging a market resource rental in lieu of tax achieves the same ultimate
objective without the cost of repurchase.’ 12
Income Tax and GST are expensive to administer
The most common taxation system imposed by governments today is income tax,
although c
ountries have not always relied so heavily on it as a way of raising revenue. For