While Australia’s booming inhabitants is a contributing issue to the housing disaster, different parts are additionally including to the dilemma, writes Michael Bayliss.
IN 1993, Australia’s inhabitants was 17.7 million. I grew up in Perth which then had a inhabitants of 1.2 million. Now, 30 years later, Australia’s inhabitants is over 26 million and Perth’s inhabitants is over 2 million. It isn’t just my chronological age that seems to be getting forward of me.
Similar observations may very well be made for the common home value on this nation. In 1990, Australian home costs doubled from their 1980 worth of $76,500 to $184,600. Despite this, many discussions round my household dinner desk centred on the truth that we have been residing in a fortunate suburb in a fortunate state in a fortunate nation. My household was grateful that Perth did not have Los Angeles-style city sprawl or air pollution, we weren’t all residing in residences like Tokyo and that, in contrast to European cities, shopping for a home was nonetheless inexpensive for almost all of us.
Perhaps we must always have eaten our phrases there after which at that dinner desk.
Today, the size of Perth’s metropolitan space stretches 150 kilometres from Two Rocks within the north to Dawesville within the south. That is sort of the identical distance as travelling from north to south of Israel, from town of Haifa to only earlier than the Gaza Strip. That is sort of a little bit of further concrete and satellite tv for pc suburbs since 1993. Still, one may hope that every one this busy work in paving over our shoreline and fragile dune ecosystems may a minimum of have resulted in inexpensive housing for 2 million of us.
Population almost 8 billion: Pressures on the planet? Countless
A world population milestone of 8 billion. An exploitative economic system that assumes infinite growth on a finite planet that’s getting hotter. You do the maths.
Think again. The Perth median house price is expected by some to reach as high as $770,000 by 2025. Median rental prices rose to $535 in February. Wages aren’t keeping up – our economy is too busy siphoning off the profits to a small number of billionaires.
As a result of the mining (and population) boom in the noughties, Perth became a leader in the race to become one of the world’s most unaffordable cities. Australia’s other capital cities soon followed suit, followed by most of our coastal regional centres. The same old story is now playing out across the nation, indeed across the globe – the housing affordability crisis is a global one.
Between 2012 and 2020, I lived across four private house shares in Melbourne. On average, I spent a third of my income paying off a landlord’s mortgage while dealing with housing insecurity and uncertainty, mould and other hazards, and the stresses of keeping costs down by living with more people than there were functional bedrooms. Many people I knew were living in house shares that bordered on being severely overcrowded, which fits under the broader definition of homelessness.
For much of 2021 and some of 2022, I was officially without a permanent address. One of the reasons I was out of home – again – in 2022 is that there was a potential severe asbestos hazard in my run-down rental house, for which I was paying over $300 a week. A fuller account of this experience may be read here.
I only just made the lower rungs of “the housing ladder” with the privilege of support from a relatively well-to-do family. Many friends and extended family don’t have this luxury which has created some interpersonal tensions. Land ownership is driving a wedge between the haves and have-nots and it is tearing apart human relations and the fabric of society.
Over the next two years, Australia’s population is likely to experience its largest two-year surge in population by 650,000. While in opposition, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggested that Australia needed a “mature debate” on population.
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Now in government, he is overseeing one of the largest economic migration programs in Australia’s history. There has been no mature discussion with the voting public about how we are going to accommodate all these new people. The Albanese Government has committed to 30,000 new “social and affordable” homes at a cost of billions, to begin in 2024. However, this is a drop in the ocean against the demand that they themselves are politically engineering.
Of course, the housing crisis isn’t just about population growth.
It has resulted from many factors, including:
- interest rates;
- lending policies of financial institutions;
- government tax incentives including negative gearing and capital gains concessions;
- the lobbying power of property developers and the construction industry on federal policy and town planning outcomes; and
- the rise of the short-term rental industry such as Airbnb.
However, supply-side solutions have been very difficult to put into practice and the demand side of the housing crisis equation is often overlooked in public discourse, perhaps due to the taboo around an open conversation on population. It is also worth noting that the property industry enthusiastically encourages high population growth policies (as do many “big business” industries).
When I left school in the year 2000, John Howard was in power and it already felt like a harsher country compared to the cosier one I inhabited in the early ’90s. A friend of mine shared a book with me on how to make money in the property sector. This was becoming very popular due to the Government’s active fiscal encouragement toward a culture of housing speculation. I told him it smelled like a Ponzi scheme to me. I was also concerned that Perth was growing too fast, too quickly.
Back then, I was accused of being an alarmist, anti-growth, anti-progress by my own generation. Two decades later, more of my generation are asking the same questions. Why are we living in a society that seems so enthusiastic to grow the population while simultaneously pricing everyone not a millionaire out of the country? Where can this mentality possibly lead us other than toward ruin?
Michael Bayliss is the communications manager for Sustainable Population Australia and co-founder of Population, Permaculture and Planning. You can follow him on Twitter @Miketbay83 and Sustainable Population Australia HERE.