City Futures Blog

Last week’s news of Australian house prices rising to a new record this month is notable, although with significant inflation affecting the country for the past 18 months, that won’t be a new peak in real terms. Even so, a 7.6% since January 2023 means a resumption of real terms price growth. That seems surprising […]

[Read more →]

By Hal Pawson After more than six months of Parliamentary wrangling, the ALP’s flagship housing future fund bill finally cleared the Senate last week. For Australia’s neglected social housing sector, this presages a welcome revival of federally-supported capital investment, absent for most of the past quarter century. But, in a longer-term perspective, the resulting program […]

[Read more →]

By Ben Knight, UNSW Media Social housing in Australia has been in neglect for more than two decades. With a growing shortfall, ballooning waitlists and exploding queueing times across the country from minimal investment, the sector desperately needs a way to fund the construction of new below-market rent dwellings, and quickly. With Federal Parliament sitting […]

[Read more →]

By Hal Pawson Along with a new scheme for first home buyer assistance, Federally-led rental reform is now on the PM’s agenda. But this week’s National Cabinet and Party Conference housing announcements badly need to be integrated into a coherent and ambitious long-term strategy. Anthony Albanese has signalled backing for ‘harmonising’ tenants’ rights, country-wide, importantly […]

[Read more →]

Hal Pawson and Chris Martin writing for the UK’s leading housing industry magazine, Inside Housing In what feels like the dying days of an exhausted government, Michael Gove’s Social Housing (Regulation) and Renters (Reform) Bills look like last gasp attempts to breathe life into a housing reform agenda barely on life-support. True, many of the […]

[Read more →]

By Hal Pawson A housing policy bonanza it most certainly was not, but related announcements in Budget 2023 included some modestly positive steps that supplement the Albanese Government’s existing array of housing initiatives. These included pledged new spending to ease cost of living pressures for hard-pressed renters, and to fund dwelling energy efficiency upgrades in […]

[Read more →]

By Hal Pawson The Albanese Government’s flagship housing legislation has stalled in the Senate, with the PM alarmingly flagging a risk that the package might be abandoned until the next election. To understand what’s going on here we need to wind the clock back to the ALP’s platform taken to the 2022 election. Let’s remember […]

[Read more →]

By Hal Pawson, UNSW Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Whatever the result of the New South Wales election on March 25, rising housing stress is a problem the new state government will have to confront. Soaring rents and an extraordinary lack of rental […]

[Read more →]

On 15 March Prof Hal Pawson appeared at the Senate Economics Committee Inquiry on the Albanese Government’s package of housing legislation, entered into Parliament in February 2023. Reproduced below is his opening statement to the hearing. This draws on the Centre’s submission to the Australian Government on the draft bills as published in December 2022. […]

[Read more →]

By Dr Rupa Ganguli, City Futures Research Centre. Originally published by The Fifth Estate. In NSW, the Opal and Mascot Towers defects scandals have galvanised a wide ranging response on the issue of quality in apartment building. Together with the tragic fire in London’s Grenfell Tower, the shine has most certainly come off the so-called […]

[Read more →]