During the Albanese government’s first term, one of the main policy focuses was on public housing.
Throughout much of the second half of the government’s first term, various public housing-related policies were major bones of contention, most notably the Housing Australia Future Fund or HAFF.
The HAFF provided the Albanese government with a striking headline that they were investing $10 billion in public housing. Except the money wasn’t going to be spent on public housing, it was invested in stocks and other asset classes, and the returns would then be spent on building public housing.
Despite all the noise around the HAFF and the Albanese government’s various public housing policies, the reality of public housing completions during the government’s term has been, to put it politely, less than stellar. If we count the final 7 weeks of the Morrison government in the Albanese government’s running total, 8,500 public and social housing homes have been completed on its watch in the two and a half years to December last year.
Just a quick note: this figure is based on all homes that were not completed for the private sector, which may somewhat overstate the actual numbers. It is, however, the method previously used in academic research on this subject and thus chosen as the best possible means for up-to-date figures.
Purely for the proportion of public and social housing homes to be maintained at its current level of 3.8% of housing stock, 18,600 homes would have needed to be built across the Albanese government’s time in office.
In short, in relative terms, the country is already 10,100 homes behind where it was prior to the election of the Albanese government.
It’s also worth noting that this figure does not take into account the impact of knockdown rebuilds or homes being sold off.
If we were to instead shift the figure from public and social housing homes as a proportion of housing stock, to public and social housing homes per capita, the figure would worsen further due to the growing deficit of homes more broadly.
Despite the HAFF finally being implemented after facing a rocky path through the Senate and the Social Housing Accelerator also providing support, the nation has built fewer public and social homes in the last 12 months than it did in the year to June 2022, which was impacted by the pandemic.
Overall, 1.49% of new home completions have been non-private sector in the last 12 months, a figure lower than the average rate (1.52%) seen under the Coalition from the time of Tony Abbott’s election in 2013 to Morrison losing government in 2022.
In February 2009, the Rudd government implemented its GFC-era public housing construction stimulus program. In the last full quarter up to this point, 2.27% of new homes completed were public or social housing homes.
15 months later (the same amount of time in the data that elapsed since the HAFF passed Parliament), 5.14% of new homes completed for the quarter were social or public housing homes, on the way to a peak of 9.78% in the December quarter of 2010.
Meanwhile, the Albanese government’s latest report card on this metric reveals that just 1.30% of new homes were non-private sector completions in the December quarter of 2024.
In the end, the Albanese government doesn’t have any real excuses; the Rudd government managed it with literally some of the same people Albanese has in his team.
Whatever one may or may not think about public housing, the issue ultimately comes down to competence. If the Albanese government wants to build public housing, then that policy should be pursued with clear parameters of success.
Instead, what we have is a whole lot of rhetoric from the government and a dismal failure when it comes to actually converting its policies into new homes.