- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2202
Queensland Housing Commission dwelling, Mount Gravatt, Brisbane, c 1954. Photo: Public domain
Mission Australia doesn’t beat about the bush on this topic: the housing and homelessness crisis continues to worsen across Australia. Every hour, more than 3,200 people around this country seek help from homelessness services.
Mission Australia says that their frontline staff face huge barriers helping people move out of homelessness because there simply aren’t enough affordable homes available.
On the last census night more than 122,000 people were estimated to be homeless in Australia. The highest rate was in the Northern Territory, where 564 people per 10,000 of population were homeless.
As in other areas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were over-represented, making up 20 per cent of the homeless population despite making up only 4.3 per cent of the population as a whole.
AFFORDABILITY
One third of adults in this country rent. According to the Renters and Housing Union more than half of people renting live in food insecurity.
As house prices have skyrocketed, the people owning that housing have been looking for the maximum return from their property. That includes raising the rent.
Anyone who is renting, or who knows people who rent will be aware how bad the rental crisis is. Median weekly rent ranges from $650 in NSW to $430 in Tasmania. Rents have increased by 75 per cent in Western Australia and have rocketed up elsewhere. Wages certainly haven’t gone up by 75 per cent anywhere in Australia, and benefits like JobSeeker, the Aged care pension and Disability Support Pension have stayed level – in the case of Jobseeker, well under the poverty line.
Overall, the cost of renting in Australia has risen at more than double the pace of wages over the last five years.
PRICES
House prices have gone down slightly this year, and mainstream media is losing its mind. There’s a contradiction in Australian media attitudes towards house prices. On one hand, we’re encouraged to believe in the Australian dream – if you work hard, you can have a house. On the other hand, especially since the 1996-2007 Liberal/National government of John Howard, we’ve been conditioned to expect house prices to always rise.
Crikey’s Amy Remeikis sums up the contradiction nicely with a bit of reporting. House prices which were described as “impossibly unaffordable” in 2024, are apparently a disaster now that (some) house prices are slipping back to 2024 levels.
This raises a question not often asked in this country. What’s the point of housing? Is it to make people who can afford to get a mortgage richer? Or is it to provide people with a place to live?
IMMIGRATION
Political parties that have long depended on blaming migrants for everything have been quick to point the finger at migration. The argument is simple: there’s a finite supply of houses. Migrants want somewhere to live, so they bid up the price of housing. Hence, the far-right parties argue, if we have less migration, we’ll have cheaper housing.
These same political parties never ever say they want house prices to fall, but that’s part of the logic here.
Like many very simple ideas, this one falls apart if you look at it for a moment. Housing is not a finite resource – we can build new homes. Migrants build housing as well as living in it. They also, if migration is properly managed, work and provide jobs for the people already in the country.
A problem these parties don’t address is the labour shortage. Although the Labor government has taken some good steps in this direction by making TAFE free, there have been decades of neglect when it comes to training Australians in the trades needed for construction.
It’s a vicious circle. The government cuts down on immigration because it worries about the perception that immigration is a problem for housing. Because the government is cutting down on immigration, and because we haven’t been training people we have labour shortages. So the problem gets worse and parties that have done well off xenophobia in the past blame migrants again.
‘SOLUTIONS’
Australian politicians and media talk about housing a lot. They talk about house prices, rentals, and interest rates. They also talk about schemes for improving the housing shortage.
One idea is to give some would-be homeowners help with a deposit. Basically, the government becomes a lender and covers part of the home loan. As Clare O’Neil, Minister for Housing and Minister for Homelessness put it, that means a Sydneysider and first home buyer can purchase a $1 million apartment with a $50,000 deposit with their loan guaranteed by the Albanese government.
Is there anything wrong with this? It’s nice for the people who can take advantage of it, but doesn’t actually build any more houses. If it really takes off, it’ll just make average house price go up.
Another idea is the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF). Set up in 2023, HAFF is a fund designed to increase ‘social and affordable’ housing. HAFF is a fund which generates income from investments. Every year $500m is used to address “acute housing needs, social housing or affordable housing.”
There are several problems with HAFF. Investing is risky and unpredictable. There’s also the cost of administration. (see ‘Hidden costs of HAFF,’ Guardian #2065, 14 August 2023)
The other problem with HAFF is that weaselly term ‘social and affordable.’
PUBLIC HOUSING
‘Social and affordable’ housing is a way of keeping housing that the private sector won’t provide at arms length from the government. This form of housing is run by charities/NGOs or cooperatives. ‘Social’ just means it’s run by an NGO, with no guarantee that they won’t sell it later, or jack up the rent if it suits them.
Affordable does not mean that housing is affordable for all lower-income people. Sometimes it means that the housing is no more than 30 per cent of the tenant’s income. Other times it just means the housing is more affordable than the open market. There’s no standard definition.
What’s needed is a commitment to public housing, built and owned by the government and run not to make a profit, but to provide people with a secure place to live. You don’t see much of this in Australian political discourse. The Greens at least commit to support campaigns to defend public housing, but their policy for new builds is “social and affordable.” The other major parties don’t want a bar of it.
What Australia needs is a massive expansion of public housing, built and managed by the public sector. Using private developers has repeatedly failed the needs of the people.
The Communist Party of Australia recognises housing as a basic human right. In a modern, industrialised and relatively wealthy nation like Australia there is no excuse for homelessness or people being forced to live in sub-standard conditions. Even the idea of a free home provided for by the state should not be beyond discussion in a country like ours.
