The severity of Australia’s housing affordability crisis is obvious - this is how politicians could fix it

‘Even though we can’t eat bricks and mortar, lower house prices lead to reduced consumer confidence and spending, so timing matters.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The problems in housing affordability have been building for decades, the clear result of policy failures across all levels of government that have now brought us to what can reasonably be described as a crisis point.

The severity of the problem is obvious. For example, the Demographia Group, which reports annually on house prices in eight advanced economies, found that house prices in Australia’s five largest cities have risen from about three times average income in 1987, to seven times just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, to 10 times in 2024.