There are two big structural problems in our national policy approach to housing: the lack of a single responsible federal department, and the withdrawal over the past 30 years of the government as a public provider of social housing. These, along with the folly of freezing rents, are points we at Per Capita made in a submission to the recent Senate inquiry into “the worsening rental crisis in Australia”, established and chaired by the Australian Greens. Our submission was the most-cited of any in the committee’s final report.

So when, on Wednesday, the Greens announced their first election policy would be the creation of a “public developer” under the control of a dedicated federal department to build hundreds of
thousands of new homes across the country, I was optimistic that some of the evidence they had considered through the inquiry process had made its way into a meaningful policy.

Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather speaks at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

That optimism was badly misplaced.

The Greens’ plan, outlined by housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather at the National Press Club,
was bold on vision, big on rhetoric – and entirely wrong on policy. It would, in fact, make the housing crisis in Australia worse.

First, this isn’t a plan for more social housing. Of the 360,000 homes to be built over the next five years, 70 per cent would be available to rent, of which 20 per cent would be reserved for those on the lowest 20 per cent of incomes. This equates to just 10,000 homes per year.

The current waiting list for social housing is close to 200,000. If this policy got up, we could expect it to close that waiting list by about 2050 – if those 10,000 homes were allocated to people eligible for social housing. Inexplicably, under the Greens’ plan, they won’t be.

Their policy states that anyone in that lowest income bracket would be eligible for one of the 10,000 public homes reserved for the poor, regardless of whether they meet social housing eligibility criteria. The policy seems explicitly designed to sideline the community housing sector, which already creates secure, affordable, long-term rental housing for those on low incomes.

Second, the Greens’ idea of what is “affordable” is out of touch. The policy states that rent for the public developer homes would be “capped at 25 per cent of the national average household income”. Latest figures put that at just over $120,000 per year, or about $2300 per week, meaning the rent cap would be $575 per week. That’s about $200 more than the rate of Jobseeker, and $75 more than the maximum rate of the single age pension.