Have we reached peak affordable-housing-debate in Australia? Or is it a case of that old mountaineering saying: the fog is thickest just before the summit?
As someone who has been involved in building innovation for the past decade, what strikes me about the current debate is not its height, but its flatness. By this I mean how something as complex as housing can be reduced to one or two issues of the moment. Is the key to ending our housing woes really just “supply”? And will the Albanese government’s new $A10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) solve that problem?
Yes, this flatness is inherent to politics, but if we don’t attempt to unflatten the problem we’ll be stuck in the very public game of housing affordability “Whac-A-Mole” for quite some time. It goes something like this: release more land … ease planning restrictions … end NIMBY-ism … rent freeze … build-to-rent … early access to super … negative gearing … prefab housing … developer greed … skills shortage … gentrification … supply-chain disruption … inclusionary zoning … capital gains tax reform … industrial action … and so on and so forth.
