Australia is in the grips of a housing disaster so fundamental it will turn into a catastrophe unless urgent action is taken at a whole-of-society level.
So says former Supreme Court judge, one-time Yoorrook justice commissioner and recent Order of Australia recipient, Kevin Bell.
He argues this forcefully in his recently released book Housing: the Great Australian Right, which went on sale with the timing a publicist might dream of.
Studded with subheadings calling for action, this neat little paperback from Monash is reminiscent of the pamphleteering of early 19th century England.
Mr Bell unpacks the crisis with judicial vigour as he calls for a rights-based approach to housing and root-and-branch reform across all sectors of Australian society.
In a week when Treasurer Jim Chalmers called mortgage and rental pain "a defining issue in the economy right now" and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese replaced his housing minister, Mr Bell's intervention is timely.
Australia ranks among the worst of OECD countries when it comes to homelessness, with 122,494 people on the street at the 2021 census, disproportionately weighted towards the Indigenous.
Australia has the highest level of home ownership debt in the world yet homes are unaffordable even for households with two earning the average wage.
There's a chronic shortage of safe housing for women fleeing a violent partner while mental health issues and poor housing are "two sides of the same", Mr Bell points out.
Also during the week, the latest Closing the Gap report showed the housing targets among others for Indigenous peoples were not on track, leaving Mr Albanese to lament the lack of progress on Friday and talk of the necessity of reconciliation.
The origins of the housing debacle lie in Australia's colonial beginning with the violent dispossession of the land from the world's oldest continuous culture.
Alongside the savagery of the colonial enterprise, the killings, the physical dispossession, came a change in conception of the land or country.
Property, conceived of as commodity for sale and exchange, was the colonial mode, pushing out a holistic conception of land under the stewardship and sustenance of the community.
Mr Bell describes the encounter of the Bunorung/Boonwurrung people in present-day Victoria to sum up this conception in the moment the Indigenous population meets the invader.
"Their land was (is, and always will be) the spiritual foundation of their collective existence. It was their home in the fullest sense of the word. Under their culture the land was respected and nurtured as a vital life force."
That original sin of dispossession has gathered momentum through the generations and sits like an incubus over the present.
"Australian housing, one way or the other, is located on land taken from First People at colonisation, in what was a massive and system breach of their human rights. This is a fundamental truth of history."
It is through a rights-based approach that the looming catastrophe can be averted, Mr Bell says.
The right to decent housing and a government duty to provide it should be enshrined in all federal and state laws, Mr Bell argues.
Australia is already signatory to international conventions such as the International Bill of Rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that include these rights and duties, he notes.
Canada, which has many historical similarities to Australia, has enacted a National Housing Strategy that makes a decent home a human right and its provision a state duty, a move that could be emulated, Mr Bell says.
Policy and regulations, protections for tenants and affordable social housing would flow from those rights and duties, he says.
The plan to legislate an end to no-fault evictions announced in NSW during the week is policy in the right direction, Mr Bell said in an interview with AAP.
Ultimately, though, a human rights approach cannot work without reconciliation that recognises Indigenous people's special connection to land and country.
"It's inevitable that there be a form of truth-telling, because we can't move forward as respectful partners in a social, political, economic and cultural relationship with First Peoples unless we reckon with the impact of our history, and reckon with what what it means now, and what it means in terms of the future," Mr Bell said.
