Saturday, August 30, 2003
Welcome to Peppercornucopia – a wide brown, CPI-indexed egalitarian paradise
The history of settler Australia has had real estate as its core theme, from the earliest times. The law’s turning-a-blind-eye dispossession of the Indigenous landholders was – and still is – necessarily accompanied by a disordered, ad hoc policy for (re)allocating the fictive terra nullius.
Hence this farcical 1989 compromise – a public-minded attempt to move land policy slightly along from the squatter* days. A peppercorn was given a monetary value ($100), and then – in that uniquely Australian way – the deal’s fairness for posterity was ensured by the said peppercorn being CPI-indexed from then on.
And we said they were savages, as we took their land.
* Or more accurately, the first-generation squatter days. It takes several generations for a shockingly short-sighted policy decision to become truly capital.
The history of settler Australia has had real estate as its core theme, from the earliest times. The law’s turning-a-blind-eye dispossession of the Indigenous landholders was – and still is – necessarily accompanied by a disordered, ad hoc policy for (re)allocating the fictive terra nullius.
Hence this farcical 1989 compromise – a public-minded attempt to move land policy slightly along from the squatter* days. A peppercorn was given a monetary value ($100), and then – in that uniquely Australian way – the deal’s fairness for posterity was ensured by the said peppercorn being CPI-indexed from then on.
And we said they were savages, as we took their land.
* Or more accurately, the first-generation squatter days. It takes several generations for a shockingly short-sighted policy decision to become truly capital.
