People being squeezed out of many regional areas
Australia's regions are important to the national economy and they're also very important for those who choose to live there. But many are being squeezed out and it can have a profound impact on these cities and towns and their people with economic growth social issues and health and wellbeing suffering.
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TVTranscript
00:00 Well, we know that for a functioning rental market we need about a 3% vacancy rate.
00:08 Depending on the community, that's down well below 1%.
00:11 So there simply aren't enough homes.
00:14 There's a falsehood being perpetuated that the wonderful Australian dream of buying a
00:20 home is still going to be in reach.
00:23 There are no economic forecasters that are talking over the next 10, 20, 30 years that
00:28 are saying other than ownership rates are going to continue to decline very substantially.
00:35 And yet we still have this indifference towards the importance of the rental market.
00:40 And I'm afraid often associated with that is real indifference and disregard and disrespect
00:46 for long-term tenants.
00:47 And of course, a growing number of people will rent for their whole lives.
00:52 It's been a profound shift in a short period of time, relatively speaking.
00:56 What are the challenges being thrown up for these regions that they might have in common
00:59 and also the more nuanced changes and challenges in this time?
01:04 Housing is one of those things that has to be nuanced, as you quite rightly highlight.
01:10 The issues are different in coastal towns that rely very heavily on tourism to what
01:15 they might be perhaps in more inland towns that rely perhaps on agricultural or seasonal
01:21 crops.
01:22 And yet what we do see are very similar trends.
01:25 We have simply failed to build enough housing for quite some period of time.
01:31 We certainly have never built enough housing for people on very low incomes.
01:36 That's the housing we refer to as being social income or historically public or government
01:40 housing.
01:42 We have declined to only about 4% of all of our housing stock is now available for people
01:49 on very low incomes, the age pension, disability support pensions and the like.
01:54 So we've not seen that.
01:56 The regions also suffer very often with a lack of sophisticated builders.
02:01 It's all well and good for us to talk about increasing height and density appropriately
02:06 in some of our city locations, but you typically need a special building licence or class of
02:12 building qualification.
02:14 Those people simply don't exist in enough numbers in our regional areas.
02:18 You want a rental accommodation particularly accessible to public transport.
02:23 That often doesn't exist.
02:25 So just like we see in health and a number of other social services, people in our regional
02:31 towns and our country are really hurting even worse than people in our cities.
02:37 As a result of that we're seeing homelessness on the rise.
02:40 Are you seeing that in your area as well?
02:42 Absolutely.
02:43 At the moment every second person, so that's 50% of people that are phoning or turning
02:49 up to crisis frontline homelessness services are being turned away.
02:53 There is simply nowhere for them.
02:55 That's even worse again in our regional communities where there are often no crisis or emergency
03:00 services to begin with.
03:03 And I'm afraid the situation doesn't look like it's going to get better any time soon.
03:07 Yeah, I mean that is the outlook.
03:10 What ideally does need to change and what are the barriers to that taking place?
03:15 Well we are already starting to hear significant policy reform and a real, I think for the
03:19 first time in many decades, genuine appreciation that we have to change the housing system.
03:27 We have to stop seeing housing purely as a personal wealth creation vehicle and start
03:32 to see that fundamental human right that in fact underpins how you get an education or
03:40 educate your kids, how you manage your health, how you indeed get and keep a job.
03:45 So we're starting to see that and that's a very refreshing change.
03:48 We need to have very substantial and it can only come from governments, government investment
03:54 in that really low income household supply provision.
03:59 We've never built more homes in Australia than we've built in the last 10 years and
04:04 yet they've never been less affordable.
04:07 So supply alone is not going to fix this.
04:10 We must have a dedicated and safeguard approach to the provision of affordable rental housing.
04:17 And it's only affordable relative to household income.
04:21 So again private industry often speaks about a discount to market but frankly that's absurd
04:28 if that number is still going to be very much higher than what someone can afford to pay
04:33 given their income.
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