Paper published in the June 2021 issue of Parity, Australia’s national homelessness publication.
We need to re-connect housing policy nationally with its social and economic functions. We need to temper the use of fiscal and monetary stimulus to fuel investment demand at the expense of family household formation patterns. There are all sorts of good supply-side policies that will assist to solve the problems of housing affordability and affordable housing problems in Australia. But really nothing is more important than just seeing these as one single failure due to ‘disconnected’ policy. The social and productivity dividend from fixing this problem far exceeds the gains from microeconomic reforms previously undertaken in this nation (tariffs, corporatisation, privatisation, etc), because they make space for people to thrive. This is the ultimate infrastructure investment.
