This project examines the long-term impacts of transferring public housing to community housing providers (CHPs) in Australia. It explores how large-scale property transfers have influenced CHP operations, finances, tenant services and outcomes, and identifies policies to support the goals of transfer programs. Public housing transfers have been a prominent government strategy for growing Australia’s community housing sector for decades. Transfer programs aim to improve economic efficiency, expand the community housing sector and enhance tenant outcomes. Recent changes to program scale, contract terms, resourcing and service delivery have resulted in divergent outcomes. Assessing the impacts of different programs informs more effective transfer strategies.

What this research is about? This research looks at how housing policy and planning can better prepare for natural disasters, and enable recovery from them.It examines institutional arrangements, planning coordination and disaster management responses.Why this research is important? Australia faces many natural hazards like bushfires, floods, storms and cyclones. Climate change is making these events more frequent and intense. Because housing is heavily impacted during disasters, it's crucial that housing policy works closely with disaster risk reduction and response.

Around one in every four Australians rent their home from a private landlord. The past two decades have seen strong growth in the private rental sector and a rising incidence of long-term (perhaps perpetual) renting, especially among younger and less affluent Australians. This chapter first describes the structure and institutions of Australia's rental market, the private rental dwelling stock, and the sector's residents. Tax and other policy settings affecting the form and level of private rental property investment are then explained. The focus then shifts to regulatory policy affecting the consumer experience of private rental and forms of government financial support to low-income renters. In view of the sector's evolving significance, options for reform of present tax and regulatory policy settings are debated throughout.

Indigenous peoples remain among the most disadvantaged Australians in terms of their housing needs. This chapter begins by discussing the historical and cultural factors and past policy approaches that helped to shape the specific housing needs of Indigenous Australians in both urban and remote geographic settings. The chapter continues by critically examining contemporary policy approaches to addressing Indigenous disadvantage and the barriers to achieving better housing outcomes. Policy responses are shown to have been complex and highly volatile, characterised by frequent changes in direction and shifting responsibilities across governments. Key challenges in the social housing, home ownership and private rental service systems are described. A central theme is consideration of how housing policies could be better aligned with cultural values and Indigenous aspirations.

This paper concerns the task of national housing strategy-making in two similarly developed federal states, Canada and Australia. Strategies help to define priorities and to provide a rationale for ongoing decision-making. Strategic thinking is the antithesis of an incremental or reactive approach. For the UN study #Housing2030 (UN 2021), strategic action on housing follows a logic which begins with causal analysis, informing the selection of relevant policies and their design, which are in turn resourced via capable implementation, and adapted following evaluation. The challenge of national housing strategy-making is substantially compounded in countries like Canada and Australia where housing powers and responsibilities are primarily accorded to state or provincial administrations rather than to federal authorities. In this paper we investigate Canada’s first-ever venture of this kind, its 2017 National Housing Strategy (NHS). A key focus is the relevance of the NHS for Australia, likewise a country with little recent history of national housing policy leadership, but with a recently elected federal government pledged to develop a formal 10-year plan. Our underlying research involved documentary analysis and interviews with Canadian housing policy stakeholders, with the current paper complementing and extending the coverage of our earlier research report (Martin et al. 2023). Constituting a form of knowledge exchange, that report informed the development of a bill to legislate Australia’s National Housing and Homelessness Plan tabled in Australia’s federal parliament in 2024. Cet article porte sur l’élaboration d’une stratégie nationale en matière de logement dans deux États fédéraux développés de manière similaire, le Canada et l’Australie. Les stratégies aident à définir les priorités et à fournir une justification pour la prise de décision. La pensée stratégique est l’antithèse d’une approche incrémentale ou réactive.

This chapter examines government-led responses to the intensifying shortage of affordable housing. The emphasis is on endeavours to enable low cost (below-market) rental housing development using public subsidies and other incentives to leverage private investment, alongside adoption of new institutional and governance arrangements for affordable housing services. The chapter explains the operating principles of the affordable housing business model, including the role of public subsidy to meet the gap in funding between required investor returns and revenue based on affordable rents. International approaches to public–private co-financing are showcased, followed by an interpretation of potential lessons for Australia. The current status of Australian efforts to adopt new investment models and an analysis of the main domestic barriers to private institutional investment in affordable housing are also included.

Drawing on the evidence marshalled throughout the book, this chapter makes the case for fundamental reform of Australia’s housing policy regime and the associated governance of housing to address problems which are now deeply embedded in Australia’s housing system—especially unaffordable housing and growing wealth inequality. High level aims of reform and priority areas for action are proposed. Guiding principles to inform development of a long term comprehensive and cohesive national housing strategy are suggested. These include coordinated national leadership, tackling the causes of unaffordability, restoring tenure-neutral housing policies, rebuilding institutional capacity and prudently phasing reform. A set of short-term reforms with immediate potential to ease the affordable housing shortage and to promote the effective use of the national housing stock are also identified.

This chapter examines the motivations and justifications that underlie housing policy measures or 'interventions'. The first part of the chapter discusses the classic stated reasons for government action in this sphere: measures to promote efficiency (countering 'market failure'), to enhance equity (addressing social justice concerns) and to ensure economic stability. The application of these ideas to housing policy in Australia from the 1980s is then interpreted to show the influence of neo-liberal policy ideas. Having discussed the explanations of government intervention that stress the correction of market failure and the need to promote economic stability, the chapter goes on to review more critical perspectives on housing policy motivations and drivers, including political party ideologies, interest group politics and lobbying and a wider 'political economy' critique.

Land use planning policies are a critical component of the institutional architecture that frames housing policy. Indeed a core goal of land use planning is to ensure an 'adequate supply' of housing. This chapter has three main components. Drawing on planning and land economics principles, it first examines the ways that land use planning measures, such as 'inclusionary zoning', can generate affordable housing and the generic arguments for such measures. Secondly it identifies features of Australia's land use planning system that have direct implications for supporting affordable housing and discusses the various ways in, and extent to, which Australian governments have experimented with these. The chapter concludes by contesting popular claims that Australia's land use planning regimes are a major cause of housing unaffordability.

Concerns surrounding affordability have become central to Australian housing debates. This chapter begins by describing the housing affordability issues that have been the focal point of what is popularly seen as Australia's housing crisis, i.e. the growing hurdles faced by many would-be first home buyers, a trend generally attributed to house price inflation outstripping income growth and borrowing capacity. It then reviews the conceptual and practical issues of defining housing affordability and examines affordability outcomes across all tenures using a range of measures. That analysis helps shift the spotlight from home buyers to the intensifying rental affordability pressures affecting lower-income tenants. To conclude, the chapter discusses the underlying structural causes of Australia's housing affordability problems and their potential consequences.

This research looks at shared equity schemes, which are programs where governments or other organisations help people buy a home in exchange for part-ownership of the property. It compares the advantages, disadvantages and unintended consequences of different models, and creates an evidence-base to support the design of future government-led shared equity programs. With more people struggling to buy their first home, Federal, State and Territory Governments are increasingly adopting shared equity schemes to help Australians purchase a property. Ensuring these schemes are well designed and easily understandable can help ensure they are fit-for-purpose, maximise desired outcomes, and avoid unintended consequences like house price inflation.