Vacant Residential Property Tax in Victoria, Australia
Going through https://reiv.com.au/news/library/news-policy/vacant_residential_property_tax-fact-sheet.aspx, it seems that Victoria is not a good option to imitate. They expressly exempt “properties used as holiday homes by those with a separate principal place of residence” from the Vacant Home Tax.
If applied to a future vacant home tax statue for Wisconsin, or as a special measure in state law just for Door County, a similar exemption would seriously restrict the revenue which could be raised.
Presently, Scandia Village is in the process of being sold to a for-profit corporation: https://doorcountypulse.com/scandia-village-sold/. Context about the corporation can be understood from the previous post, https://doorcounty.substack.com/p/some-things-about-stonebridge-healthcare.
The purchasing corporation is a turnaround sort of entity. They intend to both buy and sell health care institutions. So the long-term situation of Scandia Village is unclear. From the article, the corporation intends to keep the nursing home open, but what would keep them from selling at a profit someday to some other entity which won’t make that pledge?
It seems that in the long term future, if Scandia Village is to have a nursing home for the general public, it will need to be owned by local government, with the continual budget shortfall (due to Medicaid underfunding), being made up by local tax dollars.
A vacant homes tax could be a way to keep Scandia funded in future years, and would be a much better alternative than assisted suicide for the residents who have run out of personal assets.
Robert Bender, in https://doorcountypulse.com/letter-to-the-editor-voluntary-assisted-dying-legal-in-victoria-australia/, states that assisted suicide “has been working” in Victoria, Australia. Yet https://righttolife.com.au/images/pdfs/RTL_news_SepOct18.pdf#page=4 describes serious problems, which were censored from discussion by denying registration to a former pharmacist concerned about these problems.
Bender states in his letter that Victoria has “prompt assessments and delivery of the drug”, but this summer, assisted suicide advocates criticized Victoria for not letting them kill more people, faster: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/people-dying-during-the-process-the-push-to-free-up-victoria-s-euthanasia-laws-20230614-p5dghz.html. For some, if the slope isn’t slippery enough, they will work hard to making it so.
But if the purpose of the program is to lighten the burden on the government pocketbook so they can pursue priorities like exempting vacation homes, in that sense the program has been working. But what if the exemption was eliminated, and the money used to better fund Victoria’s nursing homes? Would suicides go down?
I searched online and found recent headlines about Victoria. All but the first two were paywalled, yet the headlines say enough to get an idea of things:
Millions for aged care investors, but homes lack nurses: where does $13bn in federal funding go?
This article implies corruption. It details serious problems in Victoria.
It’s hard to think about, but frail older women in nursing homes get sexually abused too
This article estimates that there are about 1,200 sexual assaults on Victoria nursing home residents every year. This outrage could be addressed in part by better staffing and funding. https://www.health.vic.gov.au/residential-aged-care/public-sector-residential-aged-care-services says that there are 172 public nursing homes in Victoria. I don’t know how many private nursing homes they have, but that looks like a lot of annual rapes.
Patients suffer as poor Andrews raids aged care cash
This article is about the government redirecting money which would otherwise be used for the elderly.
Aged-care beds forced to close
This is due to understaffing; the rules require it.
Vic nursing homes failing basic standards
From these it is apparent that, although the Victorian government is saving some money with the assisted suicides, it doesn’t look like the savings are being redirected into helping the surviving cohorts of seniors. Rather, the remaining senior citizens are being needlessly degraded.
One of the purposes of Scandia Village was described by John Kahlert in 1978: (from the Sept. 15 post)
Are there too many old people In Door county? This is the sentiment expressed at one group meeting in Door county a short time ago. Assuming this were true, what should the community do about them? Abandon them on the ice as the Eskimos used to do? If this were proposed, probably the people who would raise the most objection would be those who have not yet seen fit to help SCAND provide a facility which would make available the kind of services older people need and enable them to live satisfactory, independent lives as long as possible.
Kahlert’s statement, “If this were proposed, probably the people who would raise the most objection would be those who have not yet seen fit to help” is worth reflecting on.
He is thinking about conservatives wary of getting the government involved in caring for elderly people, and social issues more broadly. He expected conservatives to be wary of contributing seed money to Scandia, while at the same time observed that conservatives would most strongly reject a hypothetical future measure to get elderly people to commit suicide.
This was his way, it seems, of prodding conservatives to join in with donating money to get Scandia Village started.
Kahlert went on to write “Pioneer Cemeteries”. He was well-studied about ways people died in Door County, and must have been aware of a sad incident some decades earlier, where there had been an elderly man who was fond of arranging and rearranging what appeared to be a rock garden. He was disagreeable to his family and was sent far away to an institution, where, his requests to go back home to Ephraim denied him, he committed suicide.
He doesn’t address this incident directly when discussing Scandia Village in the Advocate, and I don’t blame him, because the anecdote reflects darkly on institutionalization. Although geography contributed to his isolation, it is possible he would have despaired anyway, in any nursing home. I brought it up anyway because of context.
It wouldn’t be impossible to keep Scandia Village from becoming something to be ashamed of, but it would take support from conservatives, too, for it to go into local government ownership.
Other posts relating to Scandia Village