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Is housing really a 2024 election issue?
29 August 2024
This year ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr has promised a focus on health, housing, cost of living, and infrastructure.
Housing unaffordability and homelessness are getting a lot of attention across the country, but is the ACT government really planning a turn-around in housing?
ACTCOSS and ACT Shelter think they should be, and their focus on social housing reveals some unsettling facts. Only 5.7% of households in Canberra live in social housing; in 1989 this figure was 12.2%. The cost of private rental is a big part of our serious cost of living crisis, and the CEOs of ACTCOSS and ACT Shelter want a complete reform of our housing policy.
These two organisations, and others, perennially press for more affordable housing; but it hasn’t happened. It has been promised: but the promises seems to get lost in the build. Even the most urgent cases of need will be waiting for years to be allocated public housing in Canberra.
The Minister for Housing, Yvette Berry, is pretty pumped about new social housing builds, though. Earlier this month she said:
“We are reaching an exciting point of the program where construction projects are being completed almost every week, delivering more and more homes for Canberrans experiencing vulnerability or disadvantage,”
For a reality check, Jon Stanhope and Khalid Ahmed writing this same month in the City News say this:
“It is remarkable that in every year of the three terms of the current Greens-Labor coalition government, the stock of public housing in Canberra, relative to the population, has dropped.”
Perhaps this will all change after the new Territory Plan is released at the end of September. The government’s track record though would argue against hope. ACT Greens are certainly saying the right things about housing, but again it’s hard to know whether to abandon pessimism.
No one in the ACT government appears game to take money from other projects and put it where (you might argue) it most needs to be, which is ensuring that everyone has a secure roof over their head. This is despite the fact that when money is spent on secure and affordable housing, the return in reduced spending and demand on other services has always been shown to easily cover the initial cost.
Another question is what kind of housing actually is being built. The ACT has a limited supply of land, and it hurts to see it all go to expensive and badly designed flats. Quite a while back there we were promised a “handful” of projects to test “innovative forms of housing to address the emerging needs of Canberrans”. This promised handful are proceeding at a crawl, if at all. Two Common Ground buildings are finished, one in Gungahlin in 2015 and another in Dickson in 2022; a glacial pace of progress but at least something to show, moving some homeless people into a place of their own. On the other hand the Watson cohousing project has come to a complete stop due to government inaction. Members who have waited for years are once again having to walk away with nothing to show for money and time put in. Ironically, the smaller Stellulata project in Ainslie, which went ahead on its own because of a perception that nothing was happening with the larger project, is now featured on the ACT Planning website.
Why has Australia found itself in such a mess with its housing policy? We were unlucky to follow a Thatcherite model of encouraging home ownership and shifting wealth upwards, partly achieved by selling off public housing. The years under Howard and his neoliberal successors cost us missed opportunities to look elsewhere for successful and uncontroversial housing models such as exist in the rest of the world. These models not only give greater social stability, community support and equality, they are also cheaper and more fuel efficient to cool and heat. Meanwhile Australia races away from the pack, building single-family houses which are now the largest in the world.
The ACT is a relatively wealthy place. Surely we could make some imaginative changes and do something good in housing. Check out the Labor, Greens, independent and perhaps Liberal plans to fix this mess. This is a core issue for all of us.
A A Gunn