The government's property tax could be the booster shot this economy needs.

I understand that sounds absurd. No one likes taxes. When you're living in a country with widespread waste and graft, an instinctive willingness to raise the pitchforks against the taxman is even more understandable.

After all, surely higher taxes should discourage economic activity, not the other way around? And most times they do.

But this property tax is different.

The narrative so far, even from its supporters, is that the property tax is a necessary evil in order to buttress public finances during a downturn and pay for local services.

For its opponents, a tax is an affront, given the economic ravages of covid19.

What both sides are missing is that this could be a positive economic boost.

Context is necessary. A whole generation of investors has experienced 20 years of consistently rising property rises, artificially buoyed by oil and gas money. When growth tanked, along with the 2015 energy price crash, property prices held stable.

A large part of this is because there is very little cost to sitting on idle property. It is seen as an inflation hedge that is unlikely to decline very much in value.

The result - a significant over-investment in property. But that over-investment has not resulted in lower prices - because most owners just sit on their property, rather than sell or lower rents. The market therefore remains stagnant, and hundreds of millions if not billions are trapped in unproductive uses.

Just before 2015, a horde of businesspeople invested in gated-property developments in the $3-$4 million range. Many of these continue to sit idle - out of reach for young people. Most owners don't even care if they don't collect rent.

This has contributed to stagnation and decline in a developing economy that is in desperate need of productive, foreign-exchange-earning assets. Raising capital for a new business or an export-producing idea is that much harder when you're competing against a property as an asset.

The property tax can change this. By imposing a cost on idle property owners will be incentivised to hustle either to sell or rent their property. In the first place, this will largely result in lower rents and prices for young people.

Crucially though, more people will start to look for alternative investments, such as private equity or local stocks or bonds. With mortgage-backed lending slightly less attractive, banks will equally be nudged towards lending to non-property investments, helping to unlock some of the $8 billion they had in excess cash reserves as of June 2021. The result could be an increase in economic activity.

By jolting investors and banks out of their risk-averse stupor, it can move the frontier of what people may consider investing in. Suddenly your niece's environmentally-friendly packaging company or your nephew's friend's tech start-up looks more interesting.

Our mutual funds, brokerages, publicly traded companies, and others should take this as a new oppo