Thought Leadership
Australia's proposed bedroom tax echoes one of history's most detested levies. Peter Fraser on why this is daylight robbery in modern form - and what it means for housing, property and any business operating in regulated markets.
10 September 2025 - PolicyGovernment - By Peter Fraser
Every generation, those hungry for revenue dream up some scheme to raid the pockets of hard-working people. The latest? A so-called bedroom tax. It is bureaucratic madness, authoritarian lunacy and a grotesque throwback to one of history's most detested levies - the window tax.
The window tax, introduced in England in 1696, was literally a tax on daylight. Families bricked up their windows to escape it, condemning themselves to darkness and disease. It spread to Scotland, Ireland and France, where it lasted until 1926. For over 150 years it punished households, distorted architecture and became a symbol of arbitrary government intrusion. It was finally abolished in Britain in 1851 - remembered as one of the most foolish taxes ever imposed.
And now, in Australia, history seems to be repeating. Instead of taxing windows, loud voices want to tax bedrooms. Spare rooms - often nothing of the sort - will be treated as luxuries to be punished. The reality is different: they're used for kids who move back home when they can't afford rent, for carers who stay overnight, or simply for storage in already cramped homes. But these voices don't care. They've sniffed out another way to squeeze families and they'll dress it up as "fairness."
The outcomes will be absurd. Just as families once bricked up windows, Australians will turn to reversible tricks. Curtains, sliding partitions, hidden pocket doors and other dividers will be used to split or disguise spaces - making a room a bedroom until it isn't. A "multi-purpose space" by design, flicked back and forth depending on who's inspecting. Architects will be instructed to redesign floorplans and re-label bedrooms as "offices" or "studies." Families will begin documenting those changes formally, creating a paper trail to prove to auditors that a bedroom is anything but. A compliance industry will spring up around gaming the definition of a room.
Australians of an older generation still remember the grim era of Death Duties - designated officers marching into a grieving family home, prying into every corner, noting the make of a watch, the brand of a suit, whether there was a television in the lounge, even calculating the value of plates, cups and the radio. It was a heartless intrusion that scarred families and bred contempt for government.
The bedroom tax would unleash the same horror in a new form. Picture armies of inspectors in hi-vis vests, clipboards in hand, barging into homes to rule whether a curtained-off corner counts as a bedroom. Imagine bureaucrats arguing that a sofa-bed turns an office into a taxable room. Families dragged through endless appeals, tribunal hearings and forced to prove to pen-pushers how they use their own homes. This isn't housing reform - it is a modern inquisition, curtain by curtain, wall by wall, clipboard by clipboard.
And let's be clear: this isn't just a do-gooder folly. It carries a whiff of authoritarianism. Lenin himself would have been proud. After the October Revolution, he introduced the communal apartment - expropriating private homes, giving families a few square metres each and moving in strangers under a procedure called compaction. If the state decided your flat was "underpopulated," it was filled with new residents. Australia's bedroom tax is cut from the same cloth: others deciding how much space you're allowed to have and punishing you if you have more.
Meanwhile, Australia's chronic shortage of affordable housing goes untouched. Instead of building homes, the loud voices want to police the rooms we already live in. It is daylight robbery in its modern form - punishing Australians while avoiding the hard work of real reform.
The window tax went down in history as one of the most stupid, destructive and hated levies ever devised. If introduced here, Australia's bedroom tax will be remembered the same way - as a monument to greed, authoritarian instinct and political cowardice. It is not reform. It is robbery with a clipboard.
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Originally published on LinkedIn, 10 September 2025.