australian quarterly essay

Australia’s ‘deeply unfair’ housing system is in crisis – and our politicians are failing us

Senior Lecturer in Urbanism, University of Sydney

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Laurence Troy receives funding from the the Australian Research Council (ARC), and the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).

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“The fact that one of the least populated countries on Earth contains the world’s second most expensive housing is a national calamity, and a stunning failure of public policy,” writes Alan Kohler, in the latest Quarterly Essay .

He doesn’t mince words. We are in a housing crisis – and it is a public policy failure of the biggest kind. This crisis is about more than housing: it is a social and economic crisis, creating a society defined by inherited wealth.

Review: Quarterly Essay 92: The Great Divide – Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It by Alan Kohler (Black Inc.)

This has not happened overnight. Kohler maps out 70 years of housing public policy in Australia, starting with changes to the Commonwealth and State Housing Agreement in 1954, when the program was redirected to support home ownership by forcing the states to sell much of what was being built.

By 1971, approximately 40% of the houses built by the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement – which had included 96,000 in its first decade, from 1945 to 1955 – had been sold.

These changes have led to a generational fracture in housing pathways and a breakdown in one of the key pillars that defined Australia’s welfare state in the 20th century.

Somewhat refreshingly, Kohler captures a sentiment many of us with newly minted mortgages or stuck in private rental know, deep down: Australia’s housing system is in crisis, it is deeply unfair and our politicians are failing us.

Read more: Friday essay: how policies favouring rich, older people make young Australians Generation F-d

‘Housing is a human right’

Kohler argues the seeds of the problems we now face were established not long after the second world war, when, as he points out, the Australian government was directly funding the delivery of over 50,000 dwellings annually. Over half a century, the decline in government support for the development of new housing – and in particular for new public housing – underlies the current crisis.

In 1947, just 53.4% of Australians owned a home. By 1966, this had risen to 71.4%. Robert Menzies, prime minister from 1949 to 1966, claimed the credit. Now, in 2023, it’s dropped to around 66%.

But, Kohler says, the credit Menzies claimed for expanding access to housing is “unjustified” – instead, he and his Minister for Social Services, Bill Spooner, “destroyed” public housing and “set the scene for decades of mistakes by their successors in the Coalition”.

The subversion of the public housing program from the mid-50s onwards, reflecting the conservative and nationalist agenda of the Menzies government that instigated it, shifted the policy position on public housing from being a key plank in the building of a modern nation, to one of residual welfare. Kohler makes the case that “housing is not welfare, it’s an economic right”.

Housing is more than that: it is a human right. The wider point though, is that housing and housing policy is integral to the economic welfare of all Australians – and only considering it in terms of social welfare, a policy space that has suffered from malign neglect over half a century, has consigned housing policy to the wilderness.

Read more: Insecure renting ages you faster than owning a home, unemployment or obesity. Better housing policy can change this

Tax reduction and capital gains

While the conditions may have been set long ago, the key changes that culminated in this affordability crisis began around 2000. Discounts on capital gains, introduced by the Howard government in 1999, lit the fuse on this housing bonfire.

The tax and wealth advantages of property investing were so beneficial, it unleashed a tidal wave of demand in housing. High-income-earners in particular could reduce tax on their income, then get a kicker on capital gains later. Kohler notes that these changes have meant:

whereas in the rest of the world investing in real estate is all about getting rental income from tenants, in Australia it’s about getting an income tax deduction and then capital gain.

The charts presented in the essay can almost pinpoint the exact moment these changes passed through parliament (see below). Dwelling prices detached themselves from income growth.

Since 2000, there has been a 6% component growth in dwelling values, compared with only 3% for incomes. Prices are so detached from incomes, it is no longer possible for the average earning household to afford the average house.

Housing now defines class

As the essay’s title suggests, Kohler makes the case that over the past 30 years, public policy has created a society increasingly defined and divided by inherited wealth. Wealth is now determined, he argues, by two things: where you live, and the house you inherit from your parents.

There are two important dimensions to this. The first is that wealth (and wealth creation) has been deeply embedded in housing ownership. Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings at the University of Sydney have termed this the “asset economy” and argue new class positions are being defined through housing assets.

Traditionally, class was often defined through the type of job you did. Now, it is increasingly defined by how much property you own. Renters of course, don’t even get a look-in. This change really got underway from the mid-1980s, led by the then-Labor government through financial deregulation, broad privatisation of urban services and residualisation of welfare.

Secondly, opportunity is now no longer tied to education and hard work: it’s now inherited. The simple arithmetic on the historical trends Kohler presents exposes how the scale of the problem has shifted since the 1990s. The median price of housing has grown from around three times the median income in 1990 to around eight times in 2023.

For housing to be affordable, house prices would need to halve, or incomes would need to grow at 4% per year for 20 years, while house prices stayed the same. Neither is likely. As our recent research has shown, the problem is so extreme that in places like Sydney, the only pathway to ownership is through inherited wealth and the bank of Mum and Dad.

Housing: ‘a cartel of the majority’

Many of the broad threads of this essay were on point. They lay out how policy has not only failed to address housing problems, but actively created them. There were, however, some contradictory moments.

The first was around housing supply. After noting the key historical threads, Kohler points the finger at recalcitrant planners for blocking development. But planners, as he points out, “do not build housing, developers do”. Moreover, he acknowledges the whole “property development business model favours selling apartments to individual investors who can pay more”.

Blaming planners is not new, but it ultimately misses the point. A recent analysis suggested there were over 100,000 approved but unbuilt dwelling units in Australia between 2012 and 2000. The supply system itself is now thoroughly geared to capital flowing from investors. If developers cannot sell to them, or simply cannot make enough profit, the banks won’t lend and developers won’t build.

As Kohler notes, the politics of this is simple:

housing is a cartel of the majority, with banks and developers helping them maintain high house prices with the political class actively supporting them.

Even if financing constraints could be overcome and developers could build what they liked, the Reserve Bank Australia itself noted this would only drop prices by about 2.5%. When prices rose by 25% in 2021, this hardly seems revolutionary.

The real issue of supply is exposed in the essay, but unfortunately not returned to in the resolution. Our recent analysis showed Australia would need to deliver around 45,000 social housing dwellings per year for 20 years to meet the current backlog in demand.

When Commonwealth and state governments managed to create over 50,000 dwellings in 1950, when the population was one third what it is today, meeting today’s need should not be a problem. But the current government ambition is just 30,000 over five years – which is woeful. Even if those numbers are delivered, the share of social housing will still be going backwards.

There is much to like in this essay, which clearly demonstrates that the current housing crisis is about so much more than the shelter it represents.

Housing is deeply implicated in the very idea of what it means to be Australian and the egalitarian values many Australians hold dear. Unfortunately, the inequalities that are emerging are cementing new class inequalities – now, your chances in life will be completely dependent on the family you were born into.

The sooner we realise this, the sooner there can be a collective reflection. We need to ask: is that what we really want?

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• Public housing
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• Robert Menzies
• Capital gains

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The Quarterly Essay is an Australian institution

T here’s something about a new literary endeavour that suggests tilting at windmills. Longevity can be a harsher measure of success than sales or quality. The journal that achieves all this and political influence to boot is a rare beast indeed, but this month, with the publication of Anna Goldsworthy’s Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny , Black Inc’s Quarterly Essay reaches its 50th edition since the periodical was launched almost 13 years ago.

The mission statement in the front of the first issue declared its political non-partisanship, its commitment to "truth-telling, style and command of the essay form" and the intention – which has since been borne out to satisfying effect – to carry correspondence to previous essays in the back of each new edition. Launched by Paul Keating, surely nobody ever truly believed in the Quarterly Essay as an organ of impartiality, but that was beyond the point: an independent Australian publisher was taking a chance on the discussion and dissemination of ideas.

There’s a certain poetry to that first issue being about denial and silence. It feels appropriate that it was by Robert Manne . By aiming its attentions right down the barrel of the culture wars and calling out a failure in our dominant cultural narrative, publisher Morry Schwartz and founding editor Peter Craven announced the Quarterly Essay’s arrival with a pugnacious confidence. This was neither News Ltd nor Fairfax; this was not a publication beholden to a university or think-tank: this was political and cultural commentary with literary knobs on.

Here was an essay on Indigenous politics and the stolen generations that straddled sorrowful outrage and forensic condemnation of the prevailing orthodoxy. Craven’s introduction showed ambition and hyperbole in equal measure, quoting TS Eliot to underline its rhetorical flourishes.

Here at last, it declared, was a periodical for those Australians who measured their lives in latte spoons.

Those first few editions felt rich with possibility: John Birmingham on Timor, Guy Rundle on Howard, even, improbably, Don Watson on John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom and Australian/US relations. Eccentricity and literary ambition served the publication well, and each new QE – a naming tradition that’s always made the Essays sound vaguely like a cruise ship – redefined the possibilities for the series. The great ones have been cultural moments in and of themselves, reliably setting off skirmishes and brush fires.

The partnership between Schwartz and Craven was dissolved in a flurry of public indignation and divergent visions (the editor wanted a more international, more cultural outlook; the publisher had a preference for the local and the political). The editorial reins were handed to Chris Feik, the softly-spoken George Clooney of Black Inc: tall, wry, perpetually amused, Feik brought a book editor’s sensibility to the periodical; drawing thoughtful, original work from his authors while remaining less visible than his predecessor.

In its adolescence and into its 20s, as the backlist grew, so too did the QE’s confidence. If some of its youthful swagger and strut had become more muted, in its place came an air of authority. A resolutely left-leaning response to the Howard era, observers might reasonably have expected the precision and urgency of the Essays to diminish somewhat without a conservative government to rail against. The opposite proved to be the case: increasingly it felt as though the QE took as its mission articulating an agenda for a nascent Labour government more comfortable with spin than substance: climate change, sustainability, the Northern Territory intervention .

The 50 back-issues read like a roll call of the past decade plus of Australian political discourse and cultural preoccupations. Reading the late John Button on the challenges and threats facing the Labor party, Gideon Haigh on the cult of the CEO, or Gail Bell on depression, there’s a timelessness to their contributions. Either Australian life simply hasn’t moved on, or these essays (and others) have managed to capture some essential points about our public and intellectual lives.

As far as influence goes, the Quarterly Essay has an impressive track record of profiling political leaders in the period immediately preceding their demise: as well as David Marr’s notorious takedown of Rudd, Annabel Crabb filleted Turnbull, Margaret Simons put the squeeze on Latham, and a cavalcade of editions parsed the Howard legacy before Judith Brett performed the post-mortem. Nothing but a coincidence and historical curiosity, of course, but it’s a marker of the Essays’ influence that the announcement that David Marr was to profile "political animal" Tony Abbott, was met with a frisson of anticipation. What does it say about a publication that we might find it remarkable when it doesn’t bring down an opposition leader?

None of which is to say it’s had a spotless record: eight issues was too long to run before the publication of the first female essayist (Amanda Lohrey on the Greens). With the benefit of time, those essays with an international focus feel like less significant contributions to the conversation than their domestic shelf-mates. But, all said, it’s a remarkably consistent backlist of publications.

A new Quarterly Essay is an event. A 50th Quarterly Essay is an occasion, and a significant one at that. It is, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, erudite, thought-provoking and provocative. It’s also a cracker of a read. Fifty issues in, Morry Schwartz’s vision has become an institution and a tradition.

Grab yourself a copy. There, under the big letter Q in the top left hand corner of the front cover is the promise for issue 51: David Marr on Cardinal George Pell. As ever, the Quarterly Essay gives us a tantalising glimpse of what we’ll all be talking about next. Long may it last.

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Kohler's Quarterly Essay: fixing Australia's housing mess

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ABC News finance presenter Alan Kohler is the author of the latest Quarterly Essay .

Titled The Great Divide , it's a forensic examination of Australia's "housing mess and how to fix it".

A former editor of The Age and The Australian Financial Review , he founded the Eureka Report and has written for a number of Australian mastheads. His books include It's Your Money .

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Treasury OECD Essay Competition

The Treasury Essay Competition is a national essay contest for Australian university students to commemorate Australia’s 50 years of membership of the OECD.

Entries for the competition closed at 5 pm (AEST) on Friday 13 August 2021.

A judging panel determined a winning entry and two commendable entries.

Members of the judging panel were:

• Chair: Mark Cully, First Assistant Secretary, Macroeconomic Analysis and Policy Division, Treasury
• Dr Alexander Robson, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Australia to the OECD
• Lisa Elliston, First Assistant Secretary, International Economics and Security Division, Treasury.

The winning entries were:

• Winner : '50 Years of Australian OECD Membership: Progress, Prosperity and Potential', Anand Bharadwaj, University of Melbourne [ PDF 186KB ]
• Runner up : 'Australia and the OECD: A fruitful 50-year partnership', Rhea Choudhary, University of Melbourne [ PDF 113KB ]
• Runner up : '50 years on: Strengths and Opportunities for Australia and the OECD', Patrick Elkington, The University of Queensland [ PDF 493KB ]

Entrants were asked to write an essay of no more than 2,000 words (not including references) that addressed the following topic:

In 2021 Australia will celebrate 50 years as a member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).  The  OECD Convention , established in 1961, begins with an important statement: that economic strength and prosperity are essential for securing peace, preserving individual liberty and increasing general wellbeing. Over the last 50 years, how has Australia’s membership of the OECD helped to improve our nation’s economic strength and prosperity? You may choose to answer this with respect to a particular policy field where the OECD has been prominent, or with respect to overall measures of strength and prosperity in Australia. What lessons are there for Australia’s ongoing engagement with the OECD?

Entry was open to all students (undergraduate and postgraduate) enrolled at an Australian tertiary education institution as at 30 June 2021.

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In the spirit of reconciliation, the Treasury acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

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