Housing Crisis Solutions
Australia’s housing crisis is not a Covid issue alone and has been 20 years in the making according to the Housing Industry Association.
HIA managing director Jocelyn Martins says unfortunately there was not any one thing that a government can do within one term to fix it. But she says there are solutions.
She says the inequity of a tax system that requires new home buyers to fund an increasing burden of government expenditure has seen a decline new home builds in recent decades.
“This, in turn, leads to fewer new home buyers bearing this ever-increasing tax burden,” she says.
Martin says some initiatives which could help increase supply, reduce rents and stabilise prices are:
• Focus on increasing housing supply across all different types of housing
• Fund public housing investment beyond election cycles
• Invest in enabling infrastructure to get shovel ready land delivered faster
• Restore foreign investment into home building to help fund and boost the numbers of private rentals
• Increase spaces in the Home Guarantee Scheme
