The headline is somewhat silly. Australia already has an extensive public housing program [0]. This suggests that we already agree that everyone should have shelter. Otherwise, why do we have a public housing program? Declaring something to be a human right doesn't magically make it easier to implement complex policy.
And we don't need a book on the topic, someone needs to put a pdf up on the internet of a proposed policy change.
Public housing in Australia is vastly under-resourced. It's been deprived for resources for decades, and made only worse by self-serving decisions made by those in power.
In NSW public housing land that was established a generation or two ago has been sold off to private developers. At most there's been lip service about some low percentage of "affordable housing" being made available in the new development, but often not enforced.
The public housing stock is being depleted because of funding for repairs and renovations being cut short or eliminated entirely. There's a huge number of properties which are not able to be occupied because of roofs leaking, mould, and more.
Meanwhile, private housing is getting more and more expensive in large part by investors buying up and renting out property for top dollar.
As for a policy change:
Let multiple problems solve each other.
We have a shortage of skilled trades.
We have unemployment issues.
We have a whole lot of properties that need to be maintained and renovated.
Lets employ skilled tradespeople to teach and train new generations using public housing as the training ground. Renovate, rebuild if necessary existing properties. Build new homes and communities.
Do you know why it's under resourced? My dad used to be a manager in public housing:
1) Government housing needs to accommodate disabled people so it costs a lot more to build. They outsource the building of it to contractors. They get screwed over by these contractors since no public servant has the guts to hold contractors to account
2) The Minister wants to support some noble thing a charity is doing in this space, so the Government give land/houses to charities to manage public housing. These charities are poor at managing it until they give up and sell it off. This reduces the public housing stock.
3) A small number of tenants do significant damage to their public house. They then have to get re-housed as the government is liable if they hurt themself due to an unsafe living environment (that they caused). This costs significant amounts to fix (which again is done by contractors who's crew the government over).
4) Anyone with a sob story (refugee, whatever) demands they need a house that has a bedroom for each member of their large family. If they are given a smaller house they complain to the minister until they get moved to a new larger house. This means that housing stock that was built in the past won't meet these demands and new larger houses are needed, again taking away money from being able to mass build cheap houses increasing housing stock to meet the demand of those who need housing.
5) People who can afford renting privately hide income to get cheap housing from the government. Public housing tenants who do need public housing do the same to basically avoid paying a reasonable rental amount.
My grandparents had public housing. They treated it as their own home. They respected what had been given to them. Social housing as a concept is fucked because the social contract has been fucked.
In my mind anyone who destroys or significantly damages public housing as a tenant should be banned from ever getting public housing.
Except for government getting ripped off by contractors, which extends far beyond the need for disability housing, the causes you give are minor issues. They're the issues that pop up on tabloid news sites and TV shows.
The largest cause for it being under-resourced is because of decades of government cuts and freezes on spending.
Properties are being damaged because the government is not funding repairs and maintenance.
You can report something minor (say a window leaking), and it'll sit in a queue for a year or two before it gets looked at. Meanwhile the tenant tries to do a patch job themselves, but that really only slows things down - and the leak is now developing into a mould issue in the cupboards/wall. So now the entire kitchen needs to be replaced and your $150 repair job is now a $15k kitchen renovation job.
This happens with other things like roof leaks, where the entire property is now a health hazard due to black mould everywhere, and the tenants having to be relocated.
Meanwhile, the department does not have funds to acquire/build new property - so every loss of a property due to poor maintenance is that much more impactful.
Combine that with our aging population and yeah - we're not even close to "It's the refugees with the massive family" being even close to a real cause.
Yeah no. We are talking about a tenant, ripping the doors off the walls pulling up carpet, stealing and selling the toilet, white goods, cabinets. The destruction and damage being so complete it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair, and this is not a one off occurance.
These small minority of tenants impose significant costs on public housing, which then means the government doesn't have the funding to build more houses.
A lack of minor maintenance as you describe is due to shoddy contractors ripping off the government, doing a sub-standard job. They are responsible for doing that maintenance, and cut costs by avoiding call-outs until its significant and then do a half arsed job fixing it.
The only thing complicated is the interests of people who treat real estate as financial instruments. I think a very good start would be to remove negative gearing and provide subsidy to single home owners on a mortgage to soften the blow from resultant plummeting property value.
Migrants aren't the issue. People owning more than one house to make profit off renting out properties is a huge portion of the problem. The for-profit housing sector in Australia (and New Zealand) is absolutely disgusting and I don't think it'll change as the people with the power are also the people with the houses. Don't even get me started on the rigged and frankly corrupt banking sector.
No human being should be able to make recurring profit from the need to put a basic roof over your head.
See Singapore. Govt is the biggest landlord there (but the reason they did it was not because they cared about human rights or anything, but as a part of "infra" development to draw in foreign investment and MNCs and their employees to set up shop in Singapore). It has worked out quite well on both fronts.
I don't believe so for the basic fundamentals required to live (water, electricity, _basic_ food requirements if under a certain income bracket likewise with basic internet).
Put simply this is wrong. Migration is the issue. We are building less houses than people coming here! This is forcing up house prices, even though with interest rates going up house prices should fall.
This comment does take quite a number of steps to reach a conclusions.
Parent said that nobody should be able to profit, this will not eliminate the rental market. You can still own housing and rent it out and take a rent that covers your cost (including the work you need to do in order to rent it out).
This is already well established. Public housing also does not run on prayers and good intentions - and yet they manage to pay salary to contractors and run the administrative burden.
The only cost there is associated with public housing is the opportunity cost which is indeed something the parent commenter argues should never be a concern in areas regarding core human needs - like shelter.
> Parent said that nobody should be able to profit, this will not eliminate the rental market. You can still own housing and rent it out and take a rent that covers your cost (including the work you need to do in order to rent it out).
Why would anyone put in the time and capital to own and maintain housing, if they knew they were limited to charging only their costs? What's in it for the owners? Who would build or finance a dense, multiunit housing if it was impossible to profit?
> Public housing also does not run on prayers and good intentions - and yet they manage to pay salary to contractors and run the administrative burden.
My understanding is that public housing gets budget from government and not solely from rents. I don't see how that establishes that at cost rental is viable, unless you're suggesting that all rentals be public housing?
> Why would anyone put in the time and capital to own and maintain housing, if they knew they were limited to charging only their costs? What's in it for the owners? Who would build or finance a dense, multiunit housing if it was impossible to profit?
The intention is indeed to make it less favorable to rent out housing. That should not come as a shock. If such legislation was put in effect, we would likely see more people owning their own units and lower housing prices.
And it is not a foreign idea. The Anglo world (Australia and the US in particular) are really good at making legislation that makes it favorable for foreign entities to by up REITs and earn some buck of the fact that Australians and Americans can hardly pay their rent.
But try looking at the Austrian housing market and compare it.
> My understanding is that public housing gets budget from government and not solely from rents.
I think the governments pay for land - which again is highly inflated because of the current legislation. This is what I talked about re. opportunity cost.
> If such legislation was put in effect, we would likely see more people owning their own units and lower housing prices.
I get that that sounds nice, but won't it also make it much harder to move? Rental housing is valuable for owners because there's potential profit, but it's valuable for renters because there's flexibility. If you've got to sell your house and buy another everytime you move, that makes it harder to move to get a better job. If you've got to wait for a public housing opening, that makes it nearly impossible. If peole can't move for a better job, employers have a narrower scope of competition, which adds to downward pressure on wages and benefits.
If your position is that mobility is the general problem, then by all means, hold on to this stance.
I think the the dominant sentiment is that it is currently too hard to get long term shelter.
Also, these thing are not binary. It is not whether it is possible to rent or not. it is what fraction of the housing stock are under what regime - something we should adjust with needs.
> Why would anyone put in the time and capital to own and maintain housing, if they knew they were limited to charging only their costs?
Exactly, build a house for yourself then bugger off. People who cant afford it would get govt housing. If you want a big house with lots of rooms then you would be in the first category.
So if someone inherits a fully paid off house, they are only allowed to rent it for a fraction of the rent allowed for the mortgaged, identical property next door? If a landlord wins the lottery, are they forced to lower the rent if they pay down their mortgage?
Public housing runs because the people administrating it have no disincentives to making poor decisions because ultimately it’s the tax payer who pays.
All this guarantees is a two-tier system. Owners and basic rental properties available.
> So if someone inherits a fully paid off house, they are only allowed to rent it for a fraction of the rent allowed for the mortgaged, identical property next door?
Idk, what do you think is fair? In most rent controlled systems there is a per sqm pre-allowed rent. If you take out a mortgage that you can not service a mortgage with this rent-level, then you are at fault. On the contrary, if you don't have a mortgage, then you can pay yourself a higher salary for maintaining your rental unit.
However, if you "win the lottery" and get a house for free, don't you have the moral obligation to not maximize your rental income? You really don't need all this money (this discussion, btw, also goes into the nature of inheritance tax, where one could argue that a fair society should tax you in a way that forces you to take out a mortgage on the house you inherit - after all, you did not work for it)
The core of this is to what extend housing should be a part of a free market.
IMHO, there is plenty of opportunity right now - just move a out of the big cities and you get housing thrown at you. I do see an insistence on wanting to live in a few select cities followed by complaints that it is expensive.
> Those markets are frequently characterised by poorly maintained rental stock.
Sure, you get what you pay for.
> No.
That is fair. You definitely represent the profit obsessed sentiments that put money ahead of people. I hope you go bankrupt in a crash of a bubble with nothing but your own greed to thank.
> Parent said that nobody should be able to profit, this will not eliminate the rental market.
It certainly will. Why would anyone sit in a rental property that makes no money rather than just put it in a savings account? Even with how bad the return on investment is for savings accounts, it's miles better than 0. Sure a private entity can still rent technically but they wouldn't. Let's not consider what's legal, let's consider what people would actually do.
That leaves one entity who will be willing to rent, the government. Nevermind the incredibly poor reputation that government housing has, how will they set prices? What effect will that have on private home ownership in general? What effect will that have on personal my mobility? I would have great concerns that you'd be stuck where you were born doing the same job your parents did because nobody would ever leave their guaranteed housing in high opportunity areas.
And what of commercial real estate?
And then we circle back to public housing. A thing that already exists and nobody wants to be in. Once the rental market is destroyed and the housing market follows because individual house sellers can't compete with the government funded and subsidized rental market, nearly everyone will live in public housing where a faceless beaurocrat is responsible for the maintenance of thousands of properties that they really don't care about. Low income neighborhoods will have underfunded repair services with ling wait times and shoddy workmanship while the nice neighborhoods will enjoy prompt service by qualified technicians.
I get that the current situation isn't great but it'd be nice to come up with a better solution than destroying the whole housing market in favor of what would inevitably lead to Soviet style housing projects[1].
Sure, but imagine how that would have to work. What percentage of housing is publicly owned? Can I buy publicly owned housing? For what price? If I want to sell my house, how much can I sell it for?
How do they price housing? If there an area if the country that's a great place to live but it's all full if renters and owners, how do I move there if I get a job there? Look at how hard it is for people to get into rent controlled places in NYC.
If I'm born into an are with very little employment opportunity, it seems like my chances for upward mobility are extremely hampered.
Australia has heavily imbalanced supply-demand in housing.
It accepts a very high number of migrants each year, compared to its population, and the design of it's migration system means that these are almost all white collar workers who need homes not blue collar workers who can build them.
It's zoning system is also hyper-local, which results in NIMBY dominated planning schemes that typically prohibit increased density.
> It accepts a very high number of migrants each year, compared to its population
Looked this up - Covid aside, Australia has taken in 250k people net every year for the last ten years, except for the most recent couple of years, where it's gone up to 400k-500k[0]. That requires the equivalent of a new Canberra[1] every year.
Current population: 27m people[2]. I'm not sure what that rate per population is compared to most countries, but it's much higher than the UK's. In 2023 the UK took in 685,000 people[3], but on a base of 67.5m in 2022[4].
The economics of fixed resources, such as housing, are not directly vested in supply/demand ratios. As a proof the city where I live has gained about 80,000 new residents in the last 4.5 years. Supply cannot keep up with demand and its not effecting prices.
Its not clear if people are moving in faster than new housing can be built or if supply availability is artificially limiting speed of growth. Prices do matter, because that impacts inventory access more than any other factor and largely explains the desirability of this location, versus other locations, more than any other factor.
In the long run yes, but Australia's problem is that migration has suddenly increased from about 250k pa to 600k pa, and our building industry simply can't keep up.
Prices are spiking, but there isn't much supply response because Australia has low unemployment and few people are willing to switch careers, especially given it takes years of training to become qualified.
This is actually the case, and its shocking to see there are so many things wrong with housing here. In the time since COVID lockdowns ended my rent has doubled. Literally doubled. And people seem to be acting like its all a normal part of a functioning economy.
Only people who own houses here are drug lords, politicians and anyone over the age of 50 who bought property when it was affordable.
>> Only people who own houses here are drug lords, politicians and anyone over the age of 50 who bought property when it was affordable.
Also foreign buyers and money laundering criminals from all around the world - who knows from where? No-one knows from where because Australia keeps no systematic records and has no enforcement systems for the laws and no interest in tracking or enforcing because anything that inhibits the flow of money is bad.
You can't buy a mobile phone without 3 forms of ID but you can buy a house with a suitcase full of cash no questions asked.
> but you can buy a house with a suitcase full of cash no questions asked.
You could twenty odd years ago but I'm not sure you can anymore; IIRC cash transactions over $10K are now subject to some kind of statement as to where it came from after a laundering Bill became an Act of Law (or did it?).
I did hand over 60K as a deposit for a house some years back, the Estate agent asked why and I said I was going to be charged to cut a banker's cheque so I asked for cash instead .. they wobbled a bit about taking it and I asked if they were going to refuse to accept legal tender and that was that, cash accepted, contract signed.
Real estate agents are excluded from money laundering reporting obligations in Australia - successive governments have dithered and stalled and put off implementing AML Tranche 2 for more than 20 years because the property lobby owns the politicians and the politicians own property.
Even now there is enough talk about implementing AML tranche 2 that you might come to believe it will actually happen, but right at the last minute the will be some reason why it can't actually happen.
Australia is money laundering paradise and as a result dirty money is pouring in from around the world and sending house prices to the moon because money launderers do not care about a fair price, they care about being able to dump the money.
> Australia is money laundering paradise and as a result dirty money is pouring in from around the world and sending house prices to the moon because money launderers do not care about a fair price, they care about being able to dump the money.
I'm not sure that's true. According to the Foreign Investment Review Board[1], foreign residential purchase only makes up about 1% of sales.
Are you positing that this is incorrect data by the FIRB, or that these purchases are made in a different way which eludes this data? If so, how?
We actually do need something like this, or at least the right to develop land.
Right now in Australia we have tyranny of the majority, because the 30% of home owners + 30% of mortgage holders have realised they can get rich if the government restricts supply (bans development) and increases demand (adjusts immigration yearly to outpace construction). For a century there seemed to be a 'social contract' that getting young people a home and helping them start families was important for the country, now though that concept seems to be totally dead.
Just creating a legal 'right' to build a house on your land would be the best fix and help a lot, but long term we really need to fix the social contract which held everything together in the first place.
> For a century there seemed to be a 'social contract' that getting young people a home and helping them start families was important for the country, now though that concept seems to be totally dead.
In fact every federal and most state governments across the political divide have had some form of "first home buyer" grant or program for decades to get people into the market. Often these programs offer reduced interest, lump sums or deposits of 1-10%. This of course decreases supply.
Notice that all of these homeowners (as a collective group) have pulled the rope up behind them. For a lot of them they can't afford their house value to go down as they're on a 35 year mortgage. A 20% drop in house value could effectively destroy 5-10 years of their work paying it off via devaluation.
What would you have people do? These are self-created problems with no easy exit strategy.
Is there no easy exit strategy? I think that if you remove the barriers to making more houses people will do just that; that if there are more houses people will buy them.
Would that fix all the housing problems? Probably not but I think it'd fix a number of them.
Aggressive increase in supply reduces demand, which reduces price of existing stock. Many, many people have a vested interest in keeping that stock at a high price (both single family home owners and investors). Wiping 10 years of payments a family has made off the value of a property overnight isn't popular.
On top of that, housing is a key element of our economy ("safe as houses") and the impact on a big enough drop to make a difference would likely be very bad.
I hope this is the first of a wave of policy declaring access to stable housing a human right. It's practically impossible to avoid poverty and instability without this. Need an address to open bank accounts, get employment checks, receive medication delivery (useful for people with disabilities), and just to store your personal belongings safely.
A policy declaring some abstract right going to do very little. Most people can agree that more housing development is necessarily and desirable, in an abstract sense, or even on a national level. But when it comes to any specific location it's usually "but not in this neighborhood". Since this happens pretty much near every place that is at somewhat desirable to live (usually in/near large cities in developed countries) and consequently already have many people living there and we get the current outcome. This is the same story all across cities in Europe, Northern America and developed Asia/Oceania nowadays.
I've never been to Australia but I was under the impression it's an enormous country (compared to its population) and mostly empty. It seems odd that NIMBYism would be an issue.
It's not a room to build crisis, it's an actual shortage of housing ...
That aside, Australia's vast spaces are largely "brown" on Google Maps from lack of water and limited vegetation, the European descent and overseas born (25% of current Australian citizens) mostly cling to the fringes of the land, earning the sobriquet Fringe Dwellers from Australian poet & playwright Jack Davis, AM, BEM.
It may not be obvious but (like in most countries) people in Australia mostly live near cities with jobs, infrastructure, etc.
Various satellite cities (Geelong, Wollongong) have built up via incentive schemes, but most people don't want to live that far from their friends and families, let alone in the red desert.
That's like saying that NIMBYism is odd in the US because there's tons of empty land in Wyoming. People want to live in or near Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or Perth, not in the Outback.
Ownership | affordability are currently linked to a degree; I meet a lot of Australians in the 20 to 35 year range who want even a one or two bedroom apartment to base themselves about that's stable and reliable in the sense of a rent or a morgage payment that can be relied upon for a decade or more.
The big issues here are availability .. finding a place to rent or buy that's affordable can be a challenge, and dependability .. many rentals in recent years have been ripped out from under tennents and|or prices increased.
Housing is not a human right. The good news is the problem in most cases is government zoning and permitting policies that drastically restrict supply and there are lots of logical arguments for requiring the government to gtfo of our way in this case being close to a human right
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25, Section 1:
> Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Human rights generally represent a much higher standard than the minimal rights protected by national constitutions.
For those curious https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human... expands on what that means in practise. From what i read, it sounds like there is a right to housing being reasonably affordable, but its not like a right to a free house.
It doesn't have to be funded. No law have to be funded.
The mere idea that financial concerns is above law is a really new idea and not something to take for granted. The fact that central banks are divorced from the political process is just around 100 years old for the US (Federal Reserve Act).
It's not a new idea, it's one of the oldest ideas because it is a concern for property rights. Any of this style of "right" where it is promising to do something rather than not do something requires funding by definition, as the thing that it requires you to do will require resources and said resources will have to be forcefully confiscated from someone else. These types of "rights" are, by definition, coercive property transfers. it's fundamentally different than the original idea of rights (sometimes referred to as negative rights vs these positive rights) that cost nothing because they are of the form "The government will not do X".
Further, I am extremely skeptical positive rights solve anything because the problem is pretty much never a need for coercive property transfer, it's almost always a need for more aggressive enforcement of negative rights to stop the governments doing stupid things that screw up markets (i.e. enforce property rights by relaxing zoning and forcing permits to be quick and painless with high likelihood of being quickly approved if they fit the relaxed zoning in this case) or market power abuse by private people/corporations which then needs more aggressive antitrust enforcement (i.e. stop collusion in the rental market by breaking up large rental trusts and/or fining the crap out of people using software to collude to raise prices for this specific example). coercive property transfer just makes things worse in this case because it doesn't fix the inability to build the needed housing stock where it is needed.
Of course rights can be funded. E.g. the right to legal defence: the state cannot prosecute you if you if it isn't willing to also fund someone to defend you. That's an actual right.
I appreciate the sentiment, but how can that ever be enforced? Are high house prices a violation of my human rights? Can I take the Australian Government to court for this?
Where is the Human Rights Commission on this?
In my mind this is the stupidity of declaring things like medical treatment, housing, etc as a 'right'. Rights stem from natural law, are universal in their application and put a limit on the actions of the Government. They do not require the action of anyone to be effective.
Your idea of rights sounds much like classical liberalism. Which had, at the time the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written, failed in very obvious ways. Classical liberals got some things right, but their ideas did not lead to a peaceful and prosperous society where everyone's rights would be respected.
Instead, the countries where liberalism was the strongest also believed in imperialism. They divided the world among themselves and took advantage of everyone else. And when liberalism failed to deliver the promised prosperity to common people, those people turned to nationalism and communism. Which led to two destructive world wars and many other wars.
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written, the failure of liberalism was as obvious as the failure of communism was a few decades later. Liberalism was an insufficient foundation for a civilized society. Something more was needed, and the United Nations wrote up their vision of the future. Which they, as the winners of WW2, had every right to do according to the natural law. After all, nothing is more natural than the strong ruling over the weak.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a legally binding document. But it is a morally binding one. Particularly to the 48 countries, including Australia, that originally voted to adopt it.
Then there is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which is a legally binding treaty signed and ratified by 172 countries. Including Australia (but not including the US). It contains many of the same ideas about the rights to an adequate standard of living, health, education, and so on.
The universal declaration of human rights was drafted in 1947 and 1948 and adopted in 1948, so fascism had already spectacularly failed on the human rights front, as had communism, we just didn't know about communism's failures for a few decades because anyone who tried to tell us had their rights violated via death or gulag. Liberalism had not failed at this time (or arguably at any time. The places doing the nasty things were pretty clearly not liberal, as they pretty fundamentally don't recognize the individual and provide autonomy to the individual (as one of many reasons they weren't liberal). Instead this document is a reaction to the atrocities committed by the nazis (and would be a reaction to the atrocities committed by the communists had they been known).
The reality of Soviet communism was well known in the aftermath of WW2. The USSR had not been an isolated state between the world wars, but there was widespread migration between it and the West. Despite that, many people still believed in communism and that it would lead to a better future. They didn't stop believing until decades later.
And you don't get to apply double standards to ideologies. The places doing nasty things were liberal exactly in the same way as the USSR was communist. It wasn't liberalism in the sense the ideologues said it would be, but it was what liberalism became in the real world. In particular, classical liberalism was the dominant ideology in the 19th century British Empire.
yes the british empire that ended slavery at great personal expense because it was against their liberal values... It had warts for sure but compared to any of its contemporaries it was the best place to be a citizen of or colony of. Also you are incorrect about the ussr and knowing the atrocities. Hearing unsubstabtiated reports and having a mountain of evidence so high even the western communists had to concede communism wasnt working in the ussr are two very different things
This could be a difference between West European communists and North American communists. For Europeans, the USSR was a place you could visit and where you could meet ordinary people. Before the war, many had moved to the USSR to build communism. Many faced the purges, and some came back disappointed. And many of the purges were public matters reported openly in newspapers. The reality was well known, but most communists chose to downplay it. Despite its faults, the USSR was the most successful example of their ideology.
The rift between West European and Soviet communists started forming after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the final straw, as almost every communist party condemned the USSR.
from my perspective that is a much lower standard because it is uncomprehending of the second order effects of any right that gives you something rather than stops others from doing something to you (commonly known as positive rights). Most notably this violates article 4 and 17 (but likely others as well) because it requires you to forcefully take from someone to be able to give that shelter to someone else.
Further, this type of nonsense rarely solves the problem it is attempting to solve because it doesn't address what is almost always a market power abuse by government or powerful corporations/people (in this case mostly government getting too agressively in the way of my right to do what I want with my property via zoning and permits. The solution is relaxing zoning heavily and requiring fast approval/ low prices on permits and then letting time and people's desire to profit maximize to build out the housing stock we want and need. This requires stealing from noone, instead it requires giving the people more of their freedom back to actually solve the problem.
Maybe saying it is a more restrictive and complex standard, which makes it likely to be garbage by design as it contradicts itself and leads to unexpected second and third order negative effects would be a more accurate (which is not to say constitutions are better, they also often suffer from stupid levels of complexity and contradiction, more it says positive rights are unintelligent and foolish).
> The good news is the problem in most cases is government zoning and permitting policies that drastically restrict supply and there are lots of logical arguments for requiring the government to gtfo of our way in this case being close to a human right
Comparing between countries is useful. Indeed in most of the Anglosphere that seems to be the problem - an absurd focus on single family houses and decent amounts of NIMBYs. However I have two counterexamples showing it's not only a matter of zoning:
First, France. There is no such ridiculous zoning policies, and in fact the state does a lot to encourage higher density and affordable developments. From having a law on the books that each relevant municipality must have a minimum % of affordable housing, often provided by them directly, to very favourable investment and tax regimes to invest in building new housing to rent at controlled prices (it one of the most popular investment vehicles in France). Paris also has sort of rent controls (you can't put out a place to rent if the rent is higher than a fixed % than the median per sq m in the same area). There are generous renters protections (your landlord can't increase your rent with more than a fixed index that tracks rent increases, and only once yearly; and they can't evict you for any reason). And there are strong regulations on what can be built in terms of quality (e.g. thermal and sound isolation are mandatory). There are many massive projects of urban redevelopment where derelict areas are redone entirely for mixed use with lots of nice housing. There is lots of investment in public transit too. And there is still an affordability/availability crisis in most of the big cities (even those without Paris' rent controls).
Bulgaria, where the cities allow building of anything because it's "progress" and they get a kickback. Quality is very variable because builders don't care and inspectors look the other way with a bribe. There are literally appartement buildings with only a few metres distance. Decent density (5-10 stories usually), decent mixed use. Total lack of infrastructure investment though - little to no public transit, not enough parking/roads for the absurd "cars rule" policy adopted instead. Yet there is a housing availability and affordability crisis too. For the median worker it's unaffordable to buy, prices are more as in Western European big cities. IT workers and those in grey/black market sectors, as well as Russians parking money before the war, are fine though.
So it's not as easy as zoning. It will definitely help a lot to drastically loosen it, but government getting away from it entirely won't work either and will be to the detriment of all too (cf. Bulgaria).
I don't know enough about those two examples to authoritatively comment but I do know housing prices can be quite sticky, and the zoning and permitting is the problem most of the time but it's the problem in the sense that it is causing less than ideal supply situations, which allows prices to be driven up. There can also be situations where there is a supply mismatch where rural or urban is oversupplied. France looks like it might partially have that, as it has a very high percentage of rural housing vs the rest of the oecd (which also makes me wonder where this subsidized housing investment vehicle stuff is being built, as it could be a situation where the city is still under supplied, especially if it has rent controls, which almost always restrict supply if they are biting) I know nothing about Bulgaria so no comment.
We are facing or about to face a homelessness crisis here in Australia. It makes my blood boil the sheer greed driving this country, supported by algorithmic cartel price increases that the govt turns a blind eye to, in fact participates in. I can tell you from years of watching this that NOTHING will change. People will suffer, politicians will shrug and say "its out of our control, its the free market working as intended", and a few people will get rich while whole generations go under. I give up at this stage. Next election, people will come out and vote again for the clowns that caused all this. -- everything can be fixed but its not because greed.
I can't imagine how unsurprised you'd be to find out most pollies own investment properties[1].
I don't believe that data covers property owned via trusts/family either, or large quantities of property sold just before moving to a leadership role[2].
Discussion about this subject only online is nearly impossible due to vested interests because people commenting here more likely do not represent the homeless and the poor.
> Discussion about this subject only online is nearly impossible due to vested interests because people commenting here more likely do not represent the homeless and the poor.
This is backwards - almost noone here has a vested interest. A homeless person in Australia would have one.
Is housing unaffordable in Australia? In Sydney, the most expensive city, a small apartment rents for $500/wk. national min wage is $24/hr, or $813/wk after tax, but most jobs will pay more in sydney. Or you could live in a cheaper city earning min wage.
That perspective makes sense in America where there is a strong supply response to increasing prices.
In America, enough housing physically exists such that, it's typically just a matter of price.
In Australia, the population increased so suddenly after covid, that we just haven't been able to build enough houses quick enough to stop homelessness.
For context, at current occupancy rates, our housing industry is building enough new homes for about 240,000 additional people per year, but our net migration is about 600,000 per year.
Unlike in America, most of our homeless population does have full time jobs, it's just that there are hundreds of people applying for every available property which means it often takes many months to secure one.
Prices are increasing, and will eventually find a new higher equilibrium, but it's going to take years to build enough housing to solve our homelessness problems.
>For context, at current occupancy rates, our housing industry is building enough new homes for about 240,000 additional people per year, but our net migration is about 600,000 per year.
That is certainly a problem that needs to be fixed, but my point was just that housing is not unaffordable at the moment.
>there are hundreds of people applying for every available property which means it often takes many months to secure one.
I find that hard to believe in general. If that was the case then prices would simply increase to match demand. You will always get news stories like this, but it doesn't apply to all properties. Probably just subsidized rent, or underpriced ones. If you go for the slightly overpriced properties, I'm guessing you won't have to compete with hundreds of buyers.
61% of your wages going to rent (not even a mortgage) doesn't scream "affordable housing" to me.
And although remote working normalisation has changed things a bit in some industries, most jobs are concentrated in cities and the cost of living in or near a city is much higher than (for example) the US.
But still more than enough to pay for housing on less than half of post-tax income. Median salary is $1250/week in Australia, and presumably higher in Sydney.
You've missed the point though. Yes you can get above median wages and below median rent, but in a highly competitive market (low unemployment, low housing supply) you probably won't.
Even fudging the numbers so 50-60% of your post tax income is rent doesn't leave a lot on the table for savings, other (high) cost of living expenses etc.
Additionally, median wage is a reach for those in their first 5-10 years of career, but the jobs are still highly focused in cities.
The great unwashed voted for whom Murdoch told them to, especially Queensland.
Queensland is also the biggest predictor of Federal election outcomes.
It’s been this way since the early 90s, but ramped up in the 2010s.
The period of 2013 to 2022 was the time we should have been slowly building back the calibre of our public sector that Howard had dismantled from 1996-2006.
Murdoch ensured this wouldn’t occur, though.
I’ve become extremely cynical about the nature of the Australian character; this is best exemplified by the original text spurring the phrase “The Lucky Country”.
Australia is a beautiful and lucky country, filled with people weak of character or substance.
We are effectively the halfwit-run mine for the rest of the world. We manufacture nothing. Innovate on little.
It sounds awful, but we haven’t suffered enough. Our identity is only half developed, and our past is largely shameful.
I love my country, but we need to be better and try much harder to be better people. We need to do what we can, not just what is easy.
This. What sux is that we have so much space and decent tech and engineering education, we should be a renewables leader, but instead we have 1950s American suburban dystopia 2.0. I really think we could restructure industrial outcomes with Industry 4.0 style thinking along renewable lines, so that we can harness low cost energy in the periods where it makes sense. Aluminium smelting is a prime example. We have all these stupid sites like former open cut mines that are just begging for industrial uses, or space programs, or something else of forward-thinking potential. Not to mention oodles of flat land nobody wants to live on anyway. Unfortunately our federal government is AWOL on comm's, and the state and local government is even worse. Entrenched corruption and not my department is the order of the day. So many people see a degradation in social character, the new norm is 'me first' and 'who cares'. Our political system worked to defer change when post-WWII it didn't matter. Now reality is moving ahead and we're left with the rotting carcass of a social democracy where flesh-eating maggots (and I'm referring here to native politicians and business people especially, not well-meaning immigrants from less educated backgrounds who may not actually know another way) have already hatched and our public wealth is being carried out the door. It is a shame they tortured Assange so much, I had high hopes for his transparency applied to government. It's so sorely needed.
A massive tender for wind and solar projects is to be launched next week to help repower Australia’s biggest aluminium smelter Tomago, near Newcastle, with its majority owner saying nuclear is out of the question because it is too slow and too expensive.
The tender will be a landmark event for the Australian renewable energy transition, because the Tomalgo smelter – with annual demand of more than 8 terawatt hours, is the biggest single energy consumer in the country.
Majority owner Rio Tinto this year has already announced two record-breaking contracts for wind and solar farms in Australia to provide power for its Boyne Island smelter in Gladstone, Queensland, and its two alumina refineries in the same port city.
Those contracts included one for the first gigawatt scale solar project in Australia, the 1.1 GW Upper Calliope solar project in central Queensland, and the 1.4 GW Bungapan wind project to be developed by iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest’s majority owned Windlab.
> Unfortunately our federal government is AWOL on comm's, and the state and local government is even worse.
They don't seem to be involved and it's not clear why they should be.
It'll get better as more young people vote hopefully and we can start trying to undo some of the mess. Labor and Coalition are incredibly compromised, basically bought and paid for. The more alternative parties in the senate the better, they can't buy them all out can they?
We are a country of dim-wits but I doubt suffering will change that. We'll be stripped of our resources and bought out just like all the other countries full of dim-wits.
Are you thinking perhaps of a politician arguing for a policy change and bringing that about through party support, or a human rights lawyer bring a landmark case before a justice and then a Supreme Court?
As a general rule Supreme Court Justices only decide upon cases bought before them on the balance of the legal arguments made for or against them.
And we don't need a book on the topic, someone needs to put a pdf up on the internet of a proposed policy change.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Australia