Building productivity

While the major parties focus on demand-side interventions – Labor’s reduced minimum deposit and the Coalition’s mortgage repayment tax deductibility for first home buyers – supply-side reform is required to increase the nation’s housing stock.

Building a housing solution

Australia is spending billions trying and still failing to get people into decent homes they can afford. Some more radical options could be on the table.

Focus on the housing crisis

The housing crisis has prompted a series of housing promises from across the political spectrum, but Australia needs ideas that will actually work, rather than marginal handouts.

Sleeping at the office

There’s an underutilised resource sitting in virtually every Australian town and city that might offer at least part of the solution to the nation’s housing shortage.

Housing on the election agenda

New research from Redbridge for the Community Housing Industry Association and PowerHousing Australia shows an expansion of low cost rental housing will be a vote changing political issue at the upcoming federal election.

New council tool to combat homelessness

As the housing crisis deepens across Australia’s suburbs, local councils now have a new tool to help them manage and prevent homelessness in their communities

Homes for heroes

The Australian Defence Force needs bold, creative initiatives to attract and keep enough personnel to reach expansion targets, and making it easier for young service people to buy their own home could offer a major attraction.

Planning for regional housing

Successive governments have encouraged mass immigration to artificially bouy economic growth in the absence of real productivity rises, but this has created housing shortages and resulting price rises in Australia’s urban centres, increasing the need for better planning for housing in regional areas.

Renting your way to your first home

Fewer young people have the means to buy their first home, but is there a way to shortcut a failing system through extending ‘rent to buy’ approaches?

Helping young people buy a home

Generous tax concessions to property owners will continue to push house prices out of reach of younger generations unless structural tax reform, such as winding back capital gains tax concessions on property assets, is implemented.

The housing crisis requires more than more homes

Removing regulatory barriers to new and diverse housing production may be part of the solution in cities where supply constraints persist, but additional strategies will be required to fix the shortage of affordable homes.

NSW’s housing crisis

A rapidly increasing population and soaring interest rates and rents have created a growing housing crisis which the new NSW government will have to deal with, whatever side of politics takes power.