Experts say there's a chronic shortage of social housing
One of the much-touted solutions to Australia's current housing crisis is to build more social housing. With waiting lists more than a decade in some areas, governments and experts agree there's a chronic shortage of subsidised homes for our most vulnerable.
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TVTranscript
00:00 I think that the big problem is really that we're not recognising how valuable investing
00:09 in social housing would be for, not just for the people who directly benefit, but really
00:14 for the country as a whole.
00:16 And why do you think that is?
00:19 I mean I think we probably, we need to sort of step back for a moment and recognise that
00:24 we've really been running down the social housing system that Australia already has.
00:30 We've been running it down for about 25 years.
00:33 Running down, not just in the sense of talking it down, but running it down in the sense
00:37 that we haven't been building enough to keep up with population growth.
00:42 So social housing as a proportion of all housing has been falling and falling ever since the
00:51 1990s.
00:52 At that time we had about 6% of all our housing was either public housing or community housing,
00:59 that's what we're talking about here.
01:02 And now we're down to around about 4%.
01:06 And that really is a decline that's come about because we've been building very, very small
01:13 amounts of public housing or community housing for that period.
01:18 And that's a very big change from the 50 years after World War II when for all that period
01:27 from the 1940s to the 1990s, every year we were building usually between 8,000 and 14,000
01:37 public housing units primarily per year.
01:41 And that program, which was just a routine part of infrastructure investment, just kind
01:48 of came to an end in the late 1990s.
01:51 And we really have only been in the last, I'd say, two or three years starting to realise
01:58 that a very wide, I think a growing consensus of people is recognising that we need to reverse
02:06 that.
02:07 You made the point in this story on the ABC News website today that social housing is
02:13 not a good vote winner.
02:14 So there's been a lack of political will and you've also talked about the complexities
02:19 of the relationship between state and federal governments.
02:22 Yeah, I mean both of those factors are relevant.
02:27 Australia's not alone in sort of closing down or moving away from investing in public and
02:36 community housing in the late 1980s or late 1990s.
02:42 But I think the challenge of reversing that or the policy complexity of changing that
02:49 is greater in a country which has a federal system where it's primarily the responsibility
02:58 of state and territory governments to provide housing services and to plan cities.
03:04 But it's the federal government which has by far the greater financial firepower.
03:10 And without that financial firepower there's not a huge amount that state and territory
03:15 governments can do to fix the problem on their own or to change direction on their own.
03:20 They can do something and the Victorian government in particular and also the Queensland government
03:26 in the last three or four years have really shown the way that there are, it's not, state
03:32 and territory governments can step up or they can break out of that and they can fund their
03:42 own self-funded programs at least for a short time even when federal governments are not
03:49 interested in contributing.
03:51 But the general picture is that really we need the national government to commit to
04:00 take an active role in being the major funder of an expensive infrastructure item like this.
04:09 The Productivity Commission data shows that in 2022 to 2023 that $1.4 billion was spent
04:17 on emergency homelessness services.
04:20 So social housing could be argued, a lack of it is an expensive problem that we have
04:27 here because arguably that could help to address some of our homelessness issues.
04:33 Well you're absolutely right there and so I think what's important to recognise is that
04:39 there are a number of costs associated to not investing in social housing, to allowing
04:46 the stock to gradually decline as a proportion of all housing.
04:50 And one of the most important ones you've put your finger on is that we're spending
04:54 a growing amount on emergency homelessness services.
05:00 That's not investing in an asset that's valuable for the future, that's just a sticking
05:06 plaster over a problem that really needs a fundamental solution.
05:11 And we've increased emergency homelessness spending by over 30% in the last four years
05:16 alone.
05:17 And that's been a continuing trend over a much longer period.
05:21 It's not just something unusual caused by the pandemic, which certainly was a factor,
05:25 but it's a much longer term trend of rising spending on these emergency services.
05:33 And part of the reason why we're needing to spend so much is because the level of homelessness
05:39 is a consequence of not having enough social housing to accommodate that part of the population.
05:47 [BLANK_AUDIO]