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Autobiographical sketch of Philip Denny Day
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Nov, 2005 by Philip Denny Day
Land owes nothing to a precise moment of revelation or intuitive conviction. Instead, experience acquired variously, and largely fortuitously, in public administration, urban and regional planning and development, and multidisciplinary academic inquiry gradually led me over time to a realization that puzzling features of contemporary attitudes to land and property and public revenue raising were seemingly embedded in a curiously pervasive mindset.
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Born in Brisbane, Australia, I graduated in law from the University of Queensland in 1953 after seven years in the Australian Army, three of them as an army-trained Japanese linguist in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, latterly with a commission in the Intelligence Corps. After graduation, I was admitted to the Queensland Bar, but chose instead to join the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra (where, as an extracurricular activity, I served two terms as an elected member of the Australian Capital Territory Advisory Council, the modest vehicle of community representation in the days before the federal capital territory became self-governing).
For one entering the Commonwealth Service later than the more immediate postwar entrants, the promotional prospects seemed limited. I moved to New South Wales in 1959, acquiring some experience in the real estate industry before studying town and country planning at Sydney University under the inspirational Denis Winston and joining the NSW Department of Local Government. Working in state government closer to real people rather than at a distance in the more remote national government in Canberra was refreshing, and the introduction to the many dimensions of town and country planning was intensely interesting and intellectually stimulating. As a profession, town planning was still emerging; town planners were few on the ground in state and local government, and early planning schemes were unsophisticated documents. As a relatively junior officer, I found myself hearing town planning appeals throughout NSW on behalf of the local government minister pursuant to an appeals system modeled on that in the United Kingdom. Looking back, transcribing (unassisted) the parties' oral submissions and analyzing the always different planning circumstances was demanding, but drafting reports afterwards while contemplating the passing scenery courtesy of the NSW railways was often pleasantly satisfying.
After some unrelated but similarly interesting experience in the Department of Labour and Industry's industrial information bureau, I joined the Department of Decentralisation and Development, becoming Deputy Director and later Director at a time when decentralization and regional development were becoming lively issues. This was coincident with the advent in 1972 of the activist Whitlam Labor government in Canberra, which was committed to the promotion of selected growth centers, land commissions, and wide-ranging socioeconomic reform. I was the editor and main author of the NSW department's landmark Report on Selective Decentralisation, The Regional Organisation Report, and the NSW supplement to the Commonwealth/State Officials Committee Report on Decentralisation.
When the promising initiatives of the turbulent early 1970s were stalled by intergovernmental conflict, I returned to Queensland in 1974, briefly as Director of Town Planning with the Brisbane City Council before joining the University of Queensland Department of Regional and Town Planning and subsequently succeeding the inimitable Lewis Keeble as head. It was a time for vigorously propagating the objectives of town planning in the inhospitable political climate that then prevailed in Queensland and, later in the 1980s, that was reflected within the University of Queensland hierarchy.
I enjoyed two years' secondment as Director of the Australian Institute of Urban Studies in Canberra before retiring from UQ in 1988 and continuing community activism in a private capacity, along with some governmental commissions and active membership of the Royal Australian Planning Institute and editorship for 16 years of its journal Queensland Planner.
The chronological biographical minutiae, however, are not important. Disparate influences led to an awareness of the special significance of land and natural resources and eventually, in midlife, to seeing the kaleidoscopic Georgist cat. (1) At the University of Queensland, I lectured in planning law and regional planning and some introductory land economics. By the 1980s, in the course of observing the formative years of town planning in the Australian states, I had become aware that the planning system was fatally flawed unless it captured the windfall land value profits conferred upon landowners by the granting of permission; but that the evolving practice of extracting development contributions had no very clear rationale. A particularly significant involvement was membership in the Committee of Inquiry into Valuation and Rating appointed by the lord mayor of Brisbane (pop. 800,000; area 1,200 square kilometers). The committee's exhaustive two-volume report in 1989 confirmed that, for Brisbane, a rate levied on the unimproved capital value of land was the most equitable and efficient source of general revenue (apart from user charges and license fees). Significantly, the committee endorsed this approach to revenue raising "irrespective of the level of government."
