Australia must treat housing as a human right: Former State Supreme Court judge
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
And we don't need a book on the topic, someone needs to put a pdf up on the internet of a proposed policy change.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Australia
No human being should be able to make recurring profit from the need to put a basic roof over your head.
I know a significant number of people who prefer renting because of the onerousness of ownership.
Who is going to rent to them if they can't profit from it?
Parent said that nobody should be able to profit, this will not eliminate the rental market. You can still own housing and rent it out and take a rent that covers your cost (including the work you need to do in order to rent it out).
This is already well established. Public housing also does not run on prayers and good intentions - and yet they manage to pay salary to contractors and run the administrative burden.
The only cost there is associated with public housing is the opportunity cost which is indeed something the parent commenter argues should never be a concern in areas regarding core human needs - like shelter.
Public housing runs because the people administrating it have no disincentives to making poor decisions because ultimately it’s the tax payer who pays.
All this guarantees is a two-tier system. Owners and basic rental properties available.
Idk, what do you think is fair? In most rent controlled systems there is a per sqm pre-allowed rent. If you take out a mortgage that you can not service a mortgage with this rent-level, then you are at fault. On the contrary, if you don't have a mortgage, then you can pay yourself a higher salary for maintaining your rental unit.
However, if you "win the lottery" and get a house for free, don't you have the moral obligation to not maximize your rental income? You really don't need all this money (this discussion, btw, also goes into the nature of inheritance tax, where one could argue that a fair society should tax you in a way that forces you to take out a mortgage on the house you inherit - after all, you did not work for it)
The core of this is to what extend housing should be a part of a free market.
IMHO, there is plenty of opportunity right now - just move a out of the big cities and you get housing thrown at you. I do see an insistence on wanting to live in a few select cities followed by complaints that it is expensive.
Those markets are frequently characterised by poorly maintained rental stock.
>Don’t you have a moral obligation
No.
Those markets are frequently characterised by poorly maintained rental stock.
>Don’t you have a moral obligation
No.
Sure, you get what you pay for.
> No.
That is fair. You definitely represent the profit obsessed sentiments that put money ahead of people. I hope you go bankrupt in a crash of a bubble with nothing but your own greed to thank.
Why would anyone put in the time and capital to own and maintain housing, if they knew they were limited to charging only their costs? What's in it for the owners? Who would build or finance a dense, multiunit housing if it was impossible to profit?
> Public housing also does not run on prayers and good intentions - and yet they manage to pay salary to contractors and run the administrative burden.
My understanding is that public housing gets budget from government and not solely from rents. I don't see how that establishes that at cost rental is viable, unless you're suggesting that all rentals be public housing?
The intention is indeed to make it less favorable to rent out housing. That should not come as a shock. If such legislation was put in effect, we would likely see more people owning their own units and lower housing prices.
And it is not a foreign idea. The Anglo world (Australia and the US in particular) are really good at making legislation that makes it favorable for foreign entities to by up REITs and earn some buck of the fact that Australians and Americans can hardly pay their rent.
But try looking at the Austrian housing market and compare it.
> My understanding is that public housing gets budget from government and not solely from rents.
I think the governments pay for land - which again is highly inflated because of the current legislation. This is what I talked about re. opportunity cost.
I get that that sounds nice, but won't it also make it much harder to move? Rental housing is valuable for owners because there's potential profit, but it's valuable for renters because there's flexibility. If you've got to sell your house and buy another everytime you move, that makes it harder to move to get a better job. If you've got to wait for a public housing opening, that makes it nearly impossible. If peole can't move for a better job, employers have a narrower scope of competition, which adds to downward pressure on wages and benefits.
I think the the dominant sentiment is that it is currently too hard to get long term shelter.
Also, these thing are not binary. It is not whether it is possible to rent or not. it is what fraction of the housing stock are under what regime - something we should adjust with needs.
Exactly, build a house for yourself then bugger off. People who cant afford it would get govt housing. If you want a big house with lots of rooms then you would be in the first category.
It certainly will. Why would anyone sit in a rental property that makes no money rather than just put it in a savings account? Even with how bad the return on investment is for savings accounts, it's miles better than 0. Sure a private entity can still rent technically but they wouldn't. Let's not consider what's legal, let's consider what people would actually do.
That leaves one entity who will be willing to rent, the government. Nevermind the incredibly poor reputation that government housing has, how will they set prices? What effect will that have on private home ownership in general? What effect will that have on personal my mobility? I would have great concerns that you'd be stuck where you were born doing the same job your parents did because nobody would ever leave their guaranteed housing in high opportunity areas.
And what of commercial real estate?
And then we circle back to public housing. A thing that already exists and nobody wants to be in. Once the rental market is destroyed and the housing market follows because individual house sellers can't compete with the government funded and subsidized rental market, nearly everyone will live in public housing where a faceless beaurocrat is responsible for the maintenance of thousands of properties that they really don't care about. Low income neighborhoods will have underfunded repair services with ling wait times and shoddy workmanship while the nice neighborhoods will enjoy prompt service by qualified technicians.
I get that the current situation isn't great but it'd be nice to come up with a better solution than destroying the whole housing market in favor of what would inevitably lead to Soviet style housing projects[1].
How do they price housing? If there an area if the country that's a great place to live but it's all full if renters and owners, how do I move there if I get a job there? Look at how hard it is for people to get into rent controlled places in NYC.
If I'm born into an are with very little employment opportunity, it seems like my chances for upward mobility are extremely hampered.
I agree with you in principle, but I don't see a path out.
See Singapore. Govt is the biggest landlord there (but the reason they did it was not because they cared about human rights or anything, but as a part of "infra" development to draw in foreign investment and MNCs and their employees to set up shop in Singapore). It has worked out quite well on both fronts.
Vienna, Austria is also constantly used as an example - https://www.visitingvienna.com/culture/social-housing/
In NSW public housing land that was established a generation or two ago has been sold off to private developers. At most there's been lip service about some low percentage of "affordable housing" being made available in the new development, but often not enforced.
The public housing stock is being depleted because of funding for repairs and renovations being cut short or eliminated entirely. There's a huge number of properties which are not able to be occupied because of roofs leaking, mould, and more.
Meanwhile, private housing is getting more and more expensive in large part by investors buying up and renting out property for top dollar.
As for a policy change:
Let multiple problems solve each other.
We have a shortage of skilled trades. We have unemployment issues. We have a whole lot of properties that need to be maintained and renovated.
Lets employ skilled tradespeople to teach and train new generations using public housing as the training ground. Renovate, rebuild if necessary existing properties. Build new homes and communities.
1) Government housing needs to accommodate disabled people so it costs a lot more to build. They outsource the building of it to contractors. They get screwed over by these contractors since no public servant has the guts to hold contractors to account
2) The Minister wants to support some noble thing a charity is doing in this space, so the Government give land/houses to charities to manage public housing. These charities are poor at managing it until they give up and sell it off. This reduces the public housing stock.
3) A small number of tenants do significant damage to their public house. They then have to get re-housed as the government is liable if they hurt themself due to an unsafe living environment (that they caused). This costs significant amounts to fix (which again is done by contractors who's crew the government over).
4) Anyone with a sob story (refugee, whatever) demands they need a house that has a bedroom for each member of their large family. If they are given a smaller house they complain to the minister until they get moved to a new larger house. This means that housing stock that was built in the past won't meet these demands and new larger houses are needed, again taking away money from being able to mass build cheap houses increasing housing stock to meet the demand of those who need housing.
5) People who can afford renting privately hide income to get cheap housing from the government. Public housing tenants who do need public housing do the same to basically avoid paying a reasonable rental amount.
My grandparents had public housing. They treated it as their own home. They respected what had been given to them. Social housing as a concept is fucked because the social contract has been fucked.
In my mind anyone who destroys or significantly damages public housing as a tenant should be banned from ever getting public housing.
Except for government getting ripped off by contractors, which extends far beyond the need for disability housing, the causes you give are minor issues. They're the issues that pop up on tabloid news sites and TV shows.
The largest cause for it being under-resourced is because of decades of government cuts and freezes on spending.
Properties are being damaged because the government is not funding repairs and maintenance.
You can report something minor (say a window leaking), and it'll sit in a queue for a year or two before it gets looked at. Meanwhile the tenant tries to do a patch job themselves, but that really only slows things down - and the leak is now developing into a mould issue in the cupboards/wall. So now the entire kitchen needs to be replaced and your $150 repair job is now a $15k kitchen renovation job.
This happens with other things like roof leaks, where the entire property is now a health hazard due to black mould everywhere, and the tenants having to be relocated.
Meanwhile, the department does not have funds to acquire/build new property - so every loss of a property due to poor maintenance is that much more impactful.
Combine that with our aging population and yeah - we're not even close to "It's the refugees with the massive family" being even close to a real cause.
These small minority of tenants impose significant costs on public housing, which then means the government doesn't have the funding to build more houses.
A lack of minor maintenance as you describe is due to shoddy contractors ripping off the government, doing a sub-standard job. They are responsible for doing that maintenance, and cut costs by avoiding call-outs until its significant and then do a half arsed job fixing it.
Your own source says that public housing is a small percentage of housing and is at a 40 year low.
I encourage you to actually read your source
It accepts a very high number of migrants each year, compared to its population, and the design of it's migration system means that these are almost all white collar workers who need homes not blue collar workers who can build them.
It's zoning system is also hyper-local, which results in NIMBY dominated planning schemes that typically prohibit increased density.
Looked this up - Covid aside, Australia has taken in 250k people net every year for the last ten years, except for the most recent couple of years, where it's gone up to 400k-500k[0]. That requires the equivalent of a new Canberra[1] every year.
Current population: 27m people[2]. I'm not sure what that rate per population is compared to most countries, but it's much higher than the UK's. In 2023 the UK took in 685,000 people[3], but on a base of 67.5m in 2022[4].
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/overseas...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cities_in...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographics_of_A...
[3] https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographics_of_t...
When population is growing faster than housing times occupancy rate, then necessarily people are sleeping rough.
Prices are spiking, but there isn't much supply response because Australia has low unemployment and few people are willing to switch careers, especially given it takes years of training to become qualified.
It is stabilising now and will return to normal levels
A market open to buyers around the world.
A market with no obligation to report money laundering.
A market which is a ponzi that has now hit hyper growth, attracting even more global attention.
Whilst children live in tents and cars.
Politicians love it because the insane hyper growth makes them more rich because many of them own extensive housing portfolios.
Australia has nothing on the horizon to fix it.
Only people who own houses here are drug lords, politicians and anyone over the age of 50 who bought property when it was affordable.
Also foreign buyers and money laundering criminals from all around the world - who knows from where? No-one knows from where because Australia keeps no systematic records and has no enforcement systems for the laws and no interest in tracking or enforcing because anything that inhibits the flow of money is bad.
You can't buy a mobile phone without 3 forms of ID but you can buy a house with a suitcase full of cash no questions asked.
You could twenty odd years ago but I'm not sure you can anymore; IIRC cash transactions over $10K are now subject to some kind of statement as to where it came from after a laundering Bill became an Act of Law (or did it?).
I did hand over 60K as a deposit for a house some years back, the Estate agent asked why and I said I was going to be charged to cut a banker's cheque so I asked for cash instead .. they wobbled a bit about taking it and I asked if they were going to refuse to accept legal tender and that was that, cash accepted, contract signed.
Even now there is enough talk about implementing AML tranche 2 that you might come to believe it will actually happen, but right at the last minute the will be some reason why it can't actually happen.
Australia is money laundering paradise and as a result dirty money is pouring in from around the world and sending house prices to the moon because money launderers do not care about a fair price, they care about being able to dump the money.
I'm not sure that's true. According to the Foreign Investment Review Board[1], foreign residential purchase only makes up about 1% of sales.
Are you positing that this is incorrect data by the FIRB, or that these purchases are made in a different way which eludes this data? If so, how?
1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/foreign-buyers-china-...
Right now in Australia we have tyranny of the majority, because the 30% of home owners + 30% of mortgage holders have realised they can get rich if the government restricts supply (bans development) and increases demand (adjusts immigration yearly to outpace construction). For a century there seemed to be a 'social contract' that getting young people a home and helping them start families was important for the country, now though that concept seems to be totally dead.
Just creating a legal 'right' to build a house on your land would be the best fix and help a lot, but long term we really need to fix the social contract which held everything together in the first place.
In fact every federal and most state governments across the political divide have had some form of "first home buyer" grant or program for decades to get people into the market. Often these programs offer reduced interest, lump sums or deposits of 1-10%. This of course decreases supply.
Notice that all of these homeowners (as a collective group) have pulled the rope up behind them. For a lot of them they can't afford their house value to go down as they're on a 35 year mortgage. A 20% drop in house value could effectively destroy 5-10 years of their work paying it off via devaluation.
What would you have people do? These are self-created problems with no easy exit strategy.
Would that fix all the housing problems? Probably not but I think it'd fix a number of them.
On top of that, housing is a key element of our economy ("safe as houses") and the impact on a big enough drop to make a difference would likely be very bad.
The big issues here are availability .. finding a place to rent or buy that's affordable can be a challenge, and dependability .. many rentals in recent years have been ripped out from under tennents and|or prices increased.
That aside, Australia's vast spaces are largely "brown" on Google Maps from lack of water and limited vegetation, the European descent and overseas born (25% of current Australian citizens) mostly cling to the fringes of the land, earning the sobriquet Fringe Dwellers from Australian poet & playwright Jack Davis, AM, BEM.
Various satellite cities (Geelong, Wollongong) have built up via incentive schemes, but most people don't want to live that far from their friends and families, let alone in the red desert.
> Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Human rights generally represent a much higher standard than the minimal rights protected by national constitutions.
The mere idea that financial concerns is above law is a really new idea and not something to take for granted. The fact that central banks are divorced from the political process is just around 100 years old for the US (Federal Reserve Act).
Further, I am extremely skeptical positive rights solve anything because the problem is pretty much never a need for coercive property transfer, it's almost always a need for more aggressive enforcement of negative rights to stop the governments doing stupid things that screw up markets (i.e. enforce property rights by relaxing zoning and forcing permits to be quick and painless with high likelihood of being quickly approved if they fit the relaxed zoning in this case) or market power abuse by private people/corporations which then needs more aggressive antitrust enforcement (i.e. stop collusion in the rental market by breaking up large rental trusts and/or fining the crap out of people using software to collude to raise prices for this specific example). coercive property transfer just makes things worse in this case because it doesn't fix the inability to build the needed housing stock where it is needed.
Where is the Human Rights Commission on this?
In my mind this is the stupidity of declaring things like medical treatment, housing, etc as a 'right'. Rights stem from natural law, are universal in their application and put a limit on the actions of the Government. They do not require the action of anyone to be effective.
Instead, the countries where liberalism was the strongest also believed in imperialism. They divided the world among themselves and took advantage of everyone else. And when liberalism failed to deliver the promised prosperity to common people, those people turned to nationalism and communism. Which led to two destructive world wars and many other wars.
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written, the failure of liberalism was as obvious as the failure of communism was a few decades later. Liberalism was an insufficient foundation for a civilized society. Something more was needed, and the United Nations wrote up their vision of the future. Which they, as the winners of WW2, had every right to do according to the natural law. After all, nothing is more natural than the strong ruling over the weak.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a legally binding document. But it is a morally binding one. Particularly to the 48 countries, including Australia, that originally voted to adopt it.
Then there is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which is a legally binding treaty signed and ratified by 172 countries. Including Australia (but not including the US). It contains many of the same ideas about the rights to an adequate standard of living, health, education, and so on.
The universal declaration of human rights was drafted in 1947 and 1948 and adopted in 1948, so fascism had already spectacularly failed on the human rights front, as had communism, we just didn't know about communism's failures for a few decades because anyone who tried to tell us had their rights violated via death or gulag. Liberalism had not failed at this time (or arguably at any time. The places doing the nasty things were pretty clearly not liberal, as they pretty fundamentally don't recognize the individual and provide autonomy to the individual (as one of many reasons they weren't liberal). Instead this document is a reaction to the atrocities committed by the nazis (and would be a reaction to the atrocities committed by the communists had they been known).
And you don't get to apply double standards to ideologies. The places doing nasty things were liberal exactly in the same way as the USSR was communist. It wasn't liberalism in the sense the ideologues said it would be, but it was what liberalism became in the real world. In particular, classical liberalism was the dominant ideology in the 19th century British Empire.
The rift between West European and Soviet communists started forming after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the final straw, as almost every communist party condemned the USSR.
[1] https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-s...
Further, this type of nonsense rarely solves the problem it is attempting to solve because it doesn't address what is almost always a market power abuse by government or powerful corporations/people (in this case mostly government getting too agressively in the way of my right to do what I want with my property via zoning and permits. The solution is relaxing zoning heavily and requiring fast approval/ low prices on permits and then letting time and people's desire to profit maximize to build out the housing stock we want and need. This requires stealing from noone, instead it requires giving the people more of their freedom back to actually solve the problem.
Maybe saying it is a more restrictive and complex standard, which makes it likely to be garbage by design as it contradicts itself and leads to unexpected second and third order negative effects would be a more accurate (which is not to say constitutions are better, they also often suffer from stupid levels of complexity and contradiction, more it says positive rights are unintelligent and foolish).
They are talking about taking Australia up to 40 million people.
Looking at the data, this doesn't seem an unreasonable YoY increase.
1. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/populati...
2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-23/how-many-people-will-...
Comparing between countries is useful. Indeed in most of the Anglosphere that seems to be the problem - an absurd focus on single family houses and decent amounts of NIMBYs. However I have two counterexamples showing it's not only a matter of zoning:
First, France. There is no such ridiculous zoning policies, and in fact the state does a lot to encourage higher density and affordable developments. From having a law on the books that each relevant municipality must have a minimum % of affordable housing, often provided by them directly, to very favourable investment and tax regimes to invest in building new housing to rent at controlled prices (it one of the most popular investment vehicles in France). Paris also has sort of rent controls (you can't put out a place to rent if the rent is higher than a fixed % than the median per sq m in the same area). There are generous renters protections (your landlord can't increase your rent with more than a fixed index that tracks rent increases, and only once yearly; and they can't evict you for any reason). And there are strong regulations on what can be built in terms of quality (e.g. thermal and sound isolation are mandatory). There are many massive projects of urban redevelopment where derelict areas are redone entirely for mixed use with lots of nice housing. There is lots of investment in public transit too. And there is still an affordability/availability crisis in most of the big cities (even those without Paris' rent controls).
Bulgaria, where the cities allow building of anything because it's "progress" and they get a kickback. Quality is very variable because builders don't care and inspectors look the other way with a bribe. There are literally appartement buildings with only a few metres distance. Decent density (5-10 stories usually), decent mixed use. Total lack of infrastructure investment though - little to no public transit, not enough parking/roads for the absurd "cars rule" policy adopted instead. Yet there is a housing availability and affordability crisis too. For the median worker it's unaffordable to buy, prices are more as in Western European big cities. IT workers and those in grey/black market sectors, as well as Russians parking money before the war, are fine though.
So it's not as easy as zoning. It will definitely help a lot to drastically loosen it, but government getting away from it entirely won't work either and will be to the detriment of all too (cf. Bulgaria).
I don't believe that data covers property owned via trusts/family either, or large quantities of property sold just before moving to a leadership role[2].
1. https://www.yourinvestmentpropertymag.com.au/expert-insights...
2. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10682663/Peter-Dutt...
This is backwards - almost noone here has a vested interest. A homeless person in Australia would have one.
In America, enough housing physically exists such that, it's typically just a matter of price.
In Australia, the population increased so suddenly after covid, that we just haven't been able to build enough houses quick enough to stop homelessness.
For context, at current occupancy rates, our housing industry is building enough new homes for about 240,000 additional people per year, but our net migration is about 600,000 per year.
Unlike in America, most of our homeless population does have full time jobs, it's just that there are hundreds of people applying for every available property which means it often takes many months to secure one.
Prices are increasing, and will eventually find a new higher equilibrium, but it's going to take years to build enough housing to solve our homelessness problems.
That is certainly a problem that needs to be fixed, but my point was just that housing is not unaffordable at the moment.
>there are hundreds of people applying for every available property which means it often takes many months to secure one.
I find that hard to believe in general. If that was the case then prices would simply increase to match demand. You will always get news stories like this, but it doesn't apply to all properties. Probably just subsidized rent, or underpriced ones. If you go for the slightly overpriced properties, I'm guessing you won't have to compete with hundreds of buyers.
And although remote working normalisation has changed things a bit in some industries, most jobs are concentrated in cities and the cost of living in or near a city is much higher than (for example) the US.
And median Sydney rents just hit $745/w
So approximately 70% of median income is lost to rent each week for a median single income household
Similar story for me personally in Brisbane
Even fudging the numbers so 50-60% of your post tax income is rent doesn't leave a lot on the table for savings, other (high) cost of living expenses etc.
Additionally, median wage is a reach for those in their first 5-10 years of career, but the jobs are still highly focused in cities.
Everyone voted for the mess we're in, deal with it.
As a general rule Supreme Court Justices only decide upon cases bought before them on the balance of the legal arguments made for or against them.
Anything that appears to impact their impartiality is a problem, and campaigning for anything would do that.
Queensland is also the biggest predictor of Federal election outcomes.
It’s been this way since the early 90s, but ramped up in the 2010s.
The period of 2013 to 2022 was the time we should have been slowly building back the calibre of our public sector that Howard had dismantled from 1996-2006.
Murdoch ensured this wouldn’t occur, though.
I’ve become extremely cynical about the nature of the Australian character; this is best exemplified by the original text spurring the phrase “The Lucky Country”.
Australia is a beautiful and lucky country, filled with people weak of character or substance.
We are effectively the halfwit-run mine for the rest of the world. We manufacture nothing. Innovate on little.
It sounds awful, but we haven’t suffered enough. Our identity is only half developed, and our past is largely shameful.
I love my country, but we need to be better and try much harder to be better people. We need to do what we can, not just what is easy.
A massive tender for wind and solar projects is to be launched next week to help repower Australia’s biggest aluminium smelter Tomago, near Newcastle, with its majority owner saying nuclear is out of the question because it is too slow and too expensive.
The tender will be a landmark event for the Australian renewable energy transition, because the Tomalgo smelter – with annual demand of more than 8 terawatt hours, is the biggest single energy consumer in the country.
Majority owner Rio Tinto this year has already announced two record-breaking contracts for wind and solar farms in Australia to provide power for its Boyne Island smelter in Gladstone, Queensland, and its two alumina refineries in the same port city.
Those contracts included one for the first gigawatt scale solar project in Australia, the 1.1 GW Upper Calliope solar project in central Queensland, and the 1.4 GW Bungapan wind project to be developed by iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest’s majority owned Windlab.
They don't seem to be involved and it's not clear why they should be.
We are a country of dim-wits but I doubt suffering will change that. We'll be stripped of our resources and bought out just like all the other countries full of dim-wits.
It'll get better as more young people vote hopefully and we can start trying to undo some of the mess. Labor and Coalition are incredibly compromised, basically bought and paid for. The more alternative parties in the senate the better, they can't buy them all out can they?