There is an idea so old it appears in Leviticus and so radical it has never been fully implemented — and so structurally precise that it addresses the housing crisis, the concentration of wealth, and the breakdown of social cohesion in a single move.
It is the Jubilee land tenure principle. And it deserves a serious hearing.
The problem everyone can see
Housing in Australian cities has become unaffordable for a generation. The standard explanation involves supply constraints, planning regulations, interest rates, and population growth. All of these are real factors. But they are not the root cause.
The root cause is land price.
Construction costs — materials, labour, design — are manageable and have not increased dramatically relative to incomes over the past thirty years. What has increased, catastrophically, is the price of the land underneath the building. In Sydney and Melbourne the land component of a typical residential property now represents the majority of the total price. And land price is not driven by anything the owner did. It is driven by the community around it — the infrastructure built with public money, the employment centres that attract workers, the schools and hospitals and parks funded by taxpayers. The owner of land in an appreciating suburb is capturing value created by everyone else.
This is not a new observation. It is one of the oldest problems in political economy.
And in Australia the political class will not even require foreign corporations to pay a meaningful tax on the gas they extract from public land for free. The prospect of serious land reform appears remote. But the principle matters — because the next frontier may offer what the current one has foreclosed.
What the Jubilee law actually said
Leviticus 25 is precise about land. It cannot be permanently sold. What is sold is a fixed number of harvests — the right to use the land until the next Jubilee year, which came every fifty years. The price is calculated accordingly. The closer to the Jubilee, the lower the price — because fewer harvests remain. At the Jubilee the land returns to its original allotment.
The theological reasoning is stated explicitly — the land belongs to God, and the people are tenants and sojourners. No human being can hold permanent title. What they can hold is the right to use and benefit from the land for a defined period.
This is not communism. The improvements made on the land — the buildings, the cleared fields, the orchards planted — belong to the person who created them. Labour and capital are rewarded. But the underlying land, whose value is generated by the community, returns to the community.
Henry George and the land value tax
In 1879 an American economist named Henry George published Progress and Poverty — one of the bestselling books of the 19th century, now almost entirely forgotten. George observed that as societies became wealthier and more productive, poverty did not diminish — it intensified alongside the wealth. He traced the cause to land.
As a community grows and prospers the value of land within it rises — not because the landowners did anything but because the community around them created value. Railways, schools, businesses, population — all of these increase land value and the increase is captured by whoever holds title. George proposed a single tax on land value — not on buildings or improvements, only on the underlying land — sufficient to replace all other taxes. The effect would be to return to the community the value the community created, while leaving to individuals the full reward of their labour and enterprise.
George’s proposal was politically suppressed — largely because landowners were also the political class — but the economic logic has never been successfully refuted. Economists from Milton Friedman to Joseph Stiglitz, across the political spectrum, have acknowledged that a land value tax is among the most efficient and least distorting forms of taxation available.
The Tragedy of the Commons — and why it is wrong
There is a standard counter-argument to any proposal for shared land governance. It is called the Tragedy of the Commons, named after an influential 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. The argument runs like this: if land or resources are held in common rather than privately owned, each individual has an incentive to take as much as possible while the costs of depletion are shared by everyone. The rational individual overexploits the shared resource. The commons collapses. Therefore privatisation is the solution — give someone a property right and they will manage the resource sustainably because its depletion costs them directly.
This argument has been enormously influential. It has been used to justify the privatisation of water, forests, fisheries, minerals, and public land across the world. It is deployed routinely against any proposal for commons governance or public ownership of resources.
It is also empirically wrong.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom spent her career documenting what Hardin’s theory said could not exist — commons that had been managed sustainably by communities for centuries without privatisation. Alpine grazing systems in Switzerland. Irrigation networks in Spain and Japan. Fishing communities in Maine and Turkey. Forest management systems across multiple continents. In each case the community had developed its own governance mechanisms — rules, monitoring, enforcement, dispute resolution — that managed the shared resource sustainably across generations.
Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for this work. Her finding was precise: commons do not inevitably fail. They fail when the governance mechanisms that manage them are absent, weak, or destroyed.
Which brings us to the observation that matters most for Australia.
Crown lands — publicly owned land managed for the public benefit — work when the governance is intact and the political class that administers them is genuinely accountable to the public. They fail when political parties are captured by the interests of those who want to exploit the resource for private profit and sell out the public asset at below-market rates to corporate donors and allies.
That failure is not a failure of the commons. It is a failure of governance integrity. The variable is not the ownership form — public or private. The variable is whether the governance mechanism is independent of the lower-level interests that benefit from exploitation.
A governance system that depends on the character and goodwill of the particular politicians in power at any given moment has not achieved genuine emergence. It collapses back to the lower level whenever the wrong people hold power. A governance system whose rules are independent of who holds power — where the reset happens regardless of the political configuration at the time — is the genuinely emergent level.
The Jubilee principle built into law is that kind of structural independence. The land returns to community hands at the reset point regardless of which party won the last election and regardless of which corporation funded their campaign. The exploitation is structurally interrupted rather than dependent on political virtue.
This idea has appeared before
The Jubilee principle is not unique to the Hebrew Bible. Versions of it have appeared independently across cultures and centuries — each time as a response to the same structural problem.
In ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonian and Sumerian kings issued periodic debt cancellation decrees — called andurarum or misharum — that wiped out agricultural debts and freed debt slaves. These were not charity. They were standard tools of economic management, typically proclaimed by new kings or during crises, to prevent the collapse of the agricultural base that supported the whole economy. Hammurabi issued several. The economist Michael Hudson has documented these extensively, arguing that the ancient Near Eastern world understood something modern economics has largely forgotten — that debt accumulates faster than the ability to repay it, and that without periodic resets the system inevitably collapses.
In ancient Athens, Solon’s reforms of 594 BCE included the seisachtheia — the shaking off of burdens — which cancelled agricultural debts and freed Athenians enslaved for debt. Land concentration had reached the point where social order was breaking down. The reset was not generosity. It was structural necessity.
Islamic finance developed a different instrument for the same problem. The prohibition on usury — riba — interrupts the compounding mechanism at its source. If money cannot compound through interest, the dynamic by which debt grows faster than the ability to repay it is structurally prevented rather than periodically reset.
In England before the enclosure movement, large areas of land were held as commons — accessible to all members of a community for grazing, gathering, and subsistence farming. The enclosures systematically converted commons to private ownership across the 15th through 19th centuries, dispossessing millions of rural people. The human cost was catastrophic. What was lost was not just land but the structural principle that some resources belong to the community rather than to individuals.
In Scotland the Highland Clearances — the forced removal of tenant farmers to make way for sheep farming — generated a powerful tradition of land reform that continues today. Scotland has gone further than any other part of the United Kingdom in challenging concentrated land ownership, with contemporary land reform legislation still working to address a situation where around half of private land is owned by fewer than 500 people.
In Taiwan and South Korea, land reforms in the early 1950s redistributed land from landlords to tenant farmers with limits on individual holdings. Both countries subsequently developed rapidly. Economists have attributed this partly to the broad distribution of productive assets that land reform created — when people own what they work, they invest in it. The contrast with the Philippines, where land reform failed due to landlord political power, is instructive. The Philippines started from similar conditions and remained far poorer.
And perhaps most ironically — the early Zionist land settlement movement in Palestine was explicitly built on the Jubilee principle. The Jewish National Fund held land in trust for the Jewish people collectively, leasing it to settlements rather than selling it. Individual members did not own the land they farmed. Secular socialist Zionists drew directly on the Hebrew Bible’s land tenure vision even while rejecting its theological framework. The principle was sound enough to build a society on.
The pattern across all of these:
Every serious attempt to address land concentration has faced the same political obstacle. Those who hold land also hold political power, and they use it to prevent the reset. The Jubilee was probably more vision than consistent practice for exactly this reason. Solon’s reforms were partially reversed. The English commons were enclosed. The Scottish crofters fought for decades for basic tenure rights. The Philippine land reform failed.
The idea keeps appearing because the problem keeps appearing. Debt accumulates. Land concentrates. Those who arrived first capture the assets and those who come after are permanently excluded. The reset is resisted by those who benefit from the problem. The system eventually breaks down — through revolution, through collapse, through the slow grinding exclusion of a generation from the possibility of owning the ground they stand on.
We are at that point again.
The 49 year lease model
If land could only be leased for a maximum of 49 years — with the lease returning to community ownership at expiry — the structural conditions that generate the housing crisis would be interrupted at the root.
A developer or homeowner would lease land from the community for up to 49 years. They would own the buildings and improvements outright — these are the product of their labour and capital and should be fully owned. They would pay a lease fee to the community reflecting the value of the land. At the end of the lease the land returns to community hands and is re-leased — potentially to the same occupant, potentially to someone else, at the current market rate.
The multigenerational accumulation of land wealth — the mechanism by which existing landowners capture the value created by everyone around them, pass it to their children, and entrench a permanent divide between those who hold land and those who never will — is structurally interrupted. Not by confiscation. By the simple application of the principle that Leviticus encoded three thousand years ago.
Land cannot be permanently sold. What is sold is a fixed number of harvests.
What this solves
The housing crisis is primarily a land price crisis. A 49 year lease model does not eliminate the cost of housing — construction, materials, labour all remain. But it removes the speculative land price component that has made ownership impossible for a generation. If land cannot be held permanently and its value returns to the community, the incentive to speculate on land — to hold it idle waiting for appreciation, to leverage its value into more land — disappears. Land is used rather than hoarded because hoarding generates no permanent return.
The wealth concentration problem is addressed at the same root. The largest single driver of intergenerational wealth inequality in Australia is the ownership of land in appreciating areas. A 49 year lease model does not prevent people from becoming wealthy through labour, enterprise, and investment in genuine productive activity. It prevents the passive accumulation of community-generated value by those who happen to hold title to a piece of ground.
The social cohesion problem follows. The sense that the system is rigged — that those who arrived first captured the assets and those who came after are permanently excluded — is not paranoia. It is an accurate reading of a structural reality. The Jubilee principle addresses that structural reality rather than managing its symptoms.
The next frontier
If the political class of established nations will not apply these principles to existing land — and the evidence suggests they will not, captured as they are by the interests of those who benefit from the current system — then the question becomes whether the next frontier can be organised differently from the start.
Permanent settlements on the moon and in space are no longer science fiction. They are a trajectory already underway. The decisions being made now about how those settlements will be governed — who will hold title to what, on what terms, subject to what resets — will determine whether the next frontier replicates the land concentration of the old one or offers something genuinely different.
But there is a prior question that the frontier itself makes unavoidable. In a settlement on the moon, survival is communal in a way that life on Earth allows us to forget. The air, the water, the heat, the radiation shielding, the food systems — none of these can be maintained by individuals or corporations acting independently. Every person in the settlement depends on every other person for the most basic conditions of life. The infrastructure of survival cannot be privately owned and selectively withheld. A corporation that controls the air supply controls everything — and a settlement organised on that basis is not a community. It is a company town on an airless rock.
The communal nature of survival in space makes the Jubilee principle not merely desirable but structurally necessary. The settlement that tries to organise itself around private capture of common resources will not survive long enough to argue about it. The conditions themselves enforce a level of cooperation and shared governance that Earth’s abundance has allowed powerful interests to avoid.
A settlement on the moon organised around the Jubilee principle — where land can only be leased for defined periods, where the improvements belong to those who made them but the underlying ground and the life support systems return to the community, where the value created by the settlement as a whole cannot be permanently captured by those who arrived first — would be the ancient principle applied at the newest possible scale. Not as an ideological choice but as a survival requirement.
This is not utopia. It is a structural choice about how to govern a new commons before the enclosures begin. And in space, unlike on Earth, the enclosures will kill you.
The Jubilee was not utopia either. It was a structural correction built into the law. It did not require everyone to be virtuous. It required the system itself to reset periodically regardless of whether the powerful wanted it to.
That is the point. Structural solutions do not depend on the goodwill of those who benefit from the problem. They change the conditions regardless.
The ancient reset mechanism is available. It has always been available. The question is whether we can apply it to the next frontier before the same people who captured the current one capture that one too.
A closing thought: what kind of land was it?
The Zionist claim — that God bestowed the land of Israel upon the Jewish people as an absolute and permanent territorial right — deserves to be examined against the covenant itself rather than simply accepted or rejected on political grounds.
The covenant with Abraham was not made with one people in the modern ethnic or national sense. The tradition of all three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — understands Abraham as the spiritual ancestor of a community defined by faith rather than by blood or territory. Paul states this explicitly in Galatians: the promise was made to Abraham and his seed, understood not as an ethnic lineage but as all those who share the faith of Abraham. The Islamic tradition places Ibrahim at the foundation of submission to God — the original principle before the traditions diverged. The covenant was always larger than any single nation.
And the land given within that covenant was not territory in the modern sense — sovereign ground to be dominated by military force and held in perpetuity against all comers. It was held on conditions. Leviticus 25 states this without ambiguity: the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. The divine grant and the divine ownership are in the same text. You cannot claim the grant while discarding the ownership — and the ownership came with specific tenure conditions attached.
Those conditions included the Jubilee reset. The periodic return of land to its original allotment. The release of debts. The rest of the land every seventh year. The protection of the stranger and the sojourner — repeated more than thirty times in the Torah, more than almost any other commandment. The land was given to a people who were themselves strangers in Egypt, and the memory of that was written into the conditions of the covenant.
Leviticus 26 is equally explicit about what happens when the covenant conditions are not met. The land vomits out its inhabitants. The exile is not an interruption of the covenant. It is the covenant operating precisely as designed when its conditions are violated.
The ancient Near Eastern world in which this covenant was made understood land fundamentally differently from the modern territorial state. The Mesopotamian debt cancellation decrees, the Jubilee, the commons traditions across cultures — all reflect a world in which land was understood as a community resource held on conditions, not an absolute possession to be defended by military force in perpetuity. The modern concept of sovereign territory — with its absolute borders, its armies, its permanent private and national title — is a relatively recent political invention. Projecting it backward onto an ancient covenant about conditional land tenure is a category error. The text assumed an entirely different understanding of what land is and how it is held.
If the Jubilee principle were applied consistently — as the covenant itself seems to require — the question of who holds the land at any given moment would be subject to periodic reset regardless of who conquered it most recently. Ancient possession generates no permanent claim. Military force generates no permanent title. The land belongs to God. The people — all the people, the stranger and the sojourner as much as the long-established inhabitant — are tenants.
That is not a political argument for any particular contemporary settlement of the conflict in the land where all three Abrahamic traditions were born. It is the covenant’s own logic applied consistently to the covenant’s own terms.
The spiritual descendants of Abraham — as the traditions of all three faiths understand the covenant — are still living in and around that land. The question of how they live together is not resolved by military force or by appeals to ancient possession. It is resolved, if it is resolved at all, by recovering the original understanding of what the land is — not territory to be dominated but a commons held on conditions, for the benefit of all who dwell in it, with a reset built into the structure of the covenant itself.
The gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
That was always the destination.