The latest Productivity Commission report on government services underlines three decades of housing policy failure that the LNP promises to make worse while Labor attempts to maintain the deficient status quo. Michael Pascoe reports.
In a parliamentary fortnight awash with miserable politics, Senator Andrew Bragg tried his very best to land the title of asking the most inane question in either house.
The Coalition’s actual “shadow minister for home ownership”, Michael Sukkar, must have been too busy trying to gag Mark Dreyfus from speaking about the LNP politicising antisemitism, so it was left to Bragg, the shadow assistant minister, to waste the Senate’s time with a particularly dumb effort that he no doubt thought was smart, or perhaps even cunning.
Bragg engaged his full grasp of the housing crisis to pose, “How many houses have been built under the Housing Australia Future Fund agenda?”
Yes, Andy, we can all see what you did there. Of course, none have been built. Given that you partnered with the Greens to delay the necessary HAFF legislation for months in the Senate, you’d know the HAFF could not be established until November 1, 2023.
Only then could Housing Australia do the work of finding viable community housing projects, announcing the initial pipeline of 185 last September to deliver more than 13,700 social and affordable homes with the scheme’s first year of HAFF funding. The first 700 HAFF-financed affordable and social homes are scheduled to be finished by the end of this financial year.
And it is reasonably possible Bragg understands it takes time to get stuff built these days. So he knew the short answer to the question would be “none yet”.
Oh, such a gotcha! Indeed, Bragg was so proud he even posted it on his YouTube channel. Such is the Coalition’s dedication to the pursuit of image over substance.
What if the LNP wins?
A much more interesting question would be: “How many social and affordable homes will be built under the HAFF agenda if the LNP wins the next election?”
The answer is the same: none. One of Dutton’s extremely few announced actual policies is to scrap the HAFF.
And therein lies the core difference in what passes for housing policy between Labor and the LNP. Both sides of the party duopoly remain overwhelmingly and hopelessly committed to “the market” solving the Australian housing crisis that is leaving it to “the market” created. However, Labor will try to maintain the insufficient percentage of the affordable and social housing stock, while Dutton’s LNP will happily let it shrink further.
LNP lips curl at the thought of “houso”.
While the housing problem is multifaceted, I hold the unfashionable belief that it is the three decades of policy crime against social housing that has tipped us from “bad” to “crisis”, that our present shortage of housing pretty much equates to what wasn’t built to maintain our 1990s percentage of social housing.
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Productivity Commission’s report
Each year, the Productivity Commission publishes a shame file on our neglect of social housing in its “Report on Government Services”. The 2025 report quietly dropped on January 30.
Leaving aside Indigenous housing in a separate category, the PC counted just 3,937 extra public and community housing dwellings last financial year.
That’s 0.95% growth, less than half the rate of population growth, not enough to stop the steady slide in social housing’s proportion of total housing stock, not enough to dint the growing waiting lists for social housing, a.k.a. desperate people in need of affordable shelter.
The latest deficient score is pretty typical of this century and actually considerably better than the nadir reached under the Morrison Government when Sukkar was housing minister. In 2019, there were only 2,325 public out of 202,306 total dwelling completions, 1.1 per cent.
Since 2015, our social housing supply has only risen by 5.4 per cent, an extra 21,154 dwellings. In technical terms, bugger all.
Source: Productivity Commission
The growth in community housing has slightly overtaken the reduction in government-owned public housing as governments have offloaded as much as they could of this difficult responsibility. Encouraging the offload is the ability of community housing to tap into Commonwealth Rental Assistance that public housing tenants can’t.
Declining quality
And then there’s the question of declining quality in the public housing that remains.
The PC reports that 76% of public housing dwellings in Australia met “agreed minimum acceptable standards” in 2023. In other words, about a quarter did not.
Most of the decline comes from NSW, where only 61% met acceptable standards, down from 74% a decade before.
Community housing scores better, 84% acceptable nationally and 82 per cent in NSW.
Source: Productivity Commission
Standards are relative. Crucially, public and community housing is affordable for those on very low incomes, while the private market is not for most, even with our increasingly expensive Commonwealth Rental Assistance.
I have reservations about using the HAFF mechanism for funding social housing. If these off-balance sheet Future Fund-run honeypots were such a good idea, we’d have one for nuclear submarines and every other major spend. I’d prefer government to return to those heady days of directly funding public builds, both for purchase and rental involvement, as
leaving it to the market demonstrably has not worked.
But that is not going to happen. Public outrage over housing has been successfully diverted into zoning and tax and red tape issues, missing the main game.
A duopoly unable to admit the effect of Howard’s capital gains tax discount certainly won’t go near actually accepting responsibility for housing as a human right and returning to building a hefty proportion of it to keep the developers honest.
So the PC shame reports will roll on. If Andrew Bragg & Co get their way, they will get worse. If Labor continues, they will merely stay bad.
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Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.