There would have to be a minimum term for it to qualify. Otherwise, that could be worked around with a “lease” with a term of one day.

This.

This is the easiest to administrate and provides the biggest benefit. This is the low hanging fruit.

However, after Labors bloodbath when taking it to the election in... 2017 (?) it's a political non-starter.

Our government is riddled with landlords. Why would they vote for policies that don’t benefit them.

A flat land tax is a bit rough. Take some 80-year-old pensioner living in a simple house in suburbs. They've lived there for 60 years, only that suburb is now gentrified and a blanket 1% tax on the house is now a $10k/year tax bill they need to come up with (Just making up example of 1% of $1 Million property) just to stay in their own home.

This is a tough problem to figure out. I'm glad it isn't my job. Whatever the solution is, I'm sure it's more complicated that just blanket-taxing land. There'd need to be some exemptions to address this (which wouldn't be that uncommon) and other scenarios I'm too dumb to think of. And whatever exemptions are applied, would naturally lead to people exploiting them as loopholes.

Yep. Can't dodge it, encourages productive use. The only thing is it might push more properties towards airbnb unless you tax that more to make it less profitable.

More density is great, but you're taking it to some rather ridiculous extremes. 1 km is a really large radius.

Looking at Wooloowin Station in Brisbane, 1 km takes you to the opposite side of Lutwyche Rd in the west and Sandgate Rd in the east, which are areas that are very obviously not connected in terms of locality to Wooloowin Station.

The guideline for good accessibility is usually a 400 m walk to public transportation, and I think that means it's also a good guideline for where the increased density should be located around stations. (It's a bit borderline on account of the walking distance being the indirect route taken on the ground, while the radius is a simple "as the crow flies" distance, but it's a decent guideline anyway.)

50 m tall is, according to this report from the city of Victoria in Canada, 17 storeys. That would make 100 34 storeys and 150 m+ a minimum of 51 storeys. That's huge.

But we can achieve much greater density on the whole without going to such extremes. So-called "gentle density".

Council’s current approach has been “avoid changing anything at all, but when we do change, push for the tallest towers we possibly can get away with”. My policy would be almost the opposite of that. I would make widespread sweeping changes across the entire city, but the scale of those changes would be fairly small. I'm using Brisbane City Council terminology because that's what I'm familiar with, but similar concepts should apply:

I would eliminate all LDR and CR1 zones entirely and replace them with LMR3 and CR2, respectively. LDR allows only single-family separated homes. LMR2 allows 2–3 storey apartments and townhouses, as well as granny flats and duplexes, while not outlawing single-family separated homes. Then, I would make everywhere within a 400 m radius of a train station HDR1 (with the caveat that my version of HDR1 would still permit townhouses and duplexes like the current LDMR and MDR do, but which current HDR does not, while still not permitting single-family separated homes). Between 400 and 1000 m of a train station would be MDR. MDR is 5 storeys, HDR1 is 8 storeys. HDR2 (15 storeys) could be used for major important train stations, but really I don't know if I want to see anything more than 8 storeys further out from the CBD than about 5 km.

But that first step is really the most important. You could get a doubling or more of available density just by removing all the low density and replacing it with a gentle sort of medium density, with the higher density areas sort of like the spice on top.

Cities are still good even if you don't need to commute into work. Having higher density means people can walk or cycle to visit friends, or when going to social and sporting clubs. They mean you can get to the shops much more easily, and are more likely to have access to a wide variety of niche stores.

They're better for the environment because they reduce dependency on cars, and reducing the need to drive everywhere is excellent for children and teens who can gain a greater degree of independence when they don't have to be driven everywhere by a parent. And good for health because more passive exercise is amazing as a substitute for driving everywhere, as well as because of the reduction in pollutants in the local air caused by driving.

In short, suggesting people should spread out ad infinitum might be fine when you just look at it in terms of "home" and "work" travel, but in a much broader sense there are huge advantages to keeping people located together.

We tried that in Canada, housing in small towns just shot up to super expensive as well, and it's now just expensive everywhere.

It's already everywhere. Places like Wollongong and Newcastle have the same housing issues as Sydney. Sometimes even worse. And even further out to places like in the Maitland and Cessnock council areas people can't afford rent anymore. And every new vacancy has hundreds of people showing up.

In fact local people are suffering more as cashed up Sydneysiders are swooping in paying the "cheap" rents which are already double what they were pre covid.