What is housing for?

Public Square, May 2025 Edition

Housing is where everything collides - infrastructure, equity, climate, governance, and national identity.

It is where systems meet - and where gaps are exposed. It’s why I’ve decided to start here.

Welcome to the first edition of Public Square, my new monthly public affairs newsletter where I’ll focus on the intersection of public policy, infrastructure, and digital transformation - with a healthy mix of whatever else I’m looking at in the moment.

What is housing for?

It sounds obvious. But hidden inside this question are Australia’s deepest contradictions.

Is housing shelter? A human right? A retirement strategy? A speculative asset?

For much of the post-war period through to the early 2000s, home ownership was a realistic goal. Governments supported it through land releases, infrastructure, and planning tuned for expansion. But that model was built on conditions that no longer exist, such as cheap land close to jobs, stable, union-backed wages, expanding fringes, and affordable services.

The model has not failed. It has expired.

The numbers are stark. Homeownership among 25- to 34-year-olds has fallen from more than 60% in the 1980s to 45% today.

Median house prices in Sydney and Melbourne are now more than 10 times median incomes. Meanwhile, rents have surged more than 20% across many cities in just a few years.

These are not anomalies. They are the logical outcome of deliberate choices.

Older generations secured ownership under one set of rules.

Now, younger Australians are told to move further out, lower their expectations, or work harder. But this is not a failure of individual effort. It is a failure of systems.

The politics of inertia

Everyone agrees that the system is broken. Reports are released. Inquiries launched. Summits held. Yet policy remains staggeringly incremental. Why? Because housing is politically radioactive.

Homeowners vote and resist local change. Investors benefit from the status quo. Renters, despite their growing numbers, are younger, less electorally concentrated, and easier to ignore.

The result? Tweaks that shift timing but rarely shift outcomes - first home buyer grants, stamp duty discounts, and planning pilots.

For decades, Australia met housing demand by pushing outward. Fringe development was cheap, accessible, and politically safe. Today, that model has collapsed. Infrastructure costs have ballooned. Car dependence is undermining emissions targets, and social isolation is growing. Commutes are longer, making job access worse. Urban infill should be the answer. But infill is slow, expensive, and fiercely opposed at the local level. Consider, for example, the pushback to the recent NSW Government Transport Oriented Development reforms. Planning is fragmented, and infrastructure upgrades trail behind growth.

We are trapped between two broken models: sprawl that cannot keep up, and density that cannot get approved.

With a renewed and expanded mandate, the re-elected Labor Government now faces a rare window to move beyond reviews and pilots – and to confront the structural reform that this issue needs.

The lost art of city building

There was a time when Australia built cities, such as Canberra or Adelaide. While not perfect, they each reflected coordination and ambition. Today, the very idea of building new cities feels unthinkable. Yet we continue to spend billions on fringe suburbs with no services, jobs, or plan.

If greenfield cities are too risky, then regional towns should be next. Australia has more than a hundred towns with populations between 1,000 and 15,000 people. Many already have transport links, water infrastructure, and basic services. What if we picked 10 and backed them properly with funding, services, and coherent growth strategies?

It would take coordination. But no more than what we already spend every year propping up low-growth fringe development.

The system around the system

One reason that reform fails is because we keep treating housing as a standalone issue. It is not. Housing affects everything, including:

• Productivity  by limiting labour mobility

• Emissions  through sprawling car dependence

• Health, education, and social cohesion

• Wealth inequality across generations

Any serious housing strategy must engage with these intersections - or it is incomplete by definition. Australia’s housing market is dominated by demand-side incentives, such as grants, tax offsets, and concessions. They inflate demand inside a system constrained by supply. They reward those with capital and leave others behind. Without coordinated supply-side reform, demand subsidies act as accelerants - not solutions.

In Australia, housing is not just shelter. It is our primary store of wealth, a retirement plan, and a social signal. More than 60% of total household wealth is tied to property. That gravitational pull distorts public policy and explains the resistance to anything that might dent home values.

The National Housing Accord commits to 1.2 million new homes over five years, but delivery depends on resolving the very systems misalignment – planning, infrastructure, services – that continues to slow down infill and distort development.

No housing policy can succeed without infrastructure. Not just roads and pipes, but the full ecosystem that makes real communities, such as:

• Water storage and recycling

• Renewable energy grids

• Connected, reliable transport

• Fast digital networks

• Schools, childcare, aged care, health services

These are not separate conversations but rather are the necessary foundations for effective shelter. The question we must ask ourselves is do we build for the next 50 years or for the next budget? Housing is broken because the system is designed to make it profitable to keep it that way.

But systems can be redesigned.

Constraint can be the moment to imagine something better.