Our submission on the National Housing and Homelessness Plan Issues Paper 

It has never been clearer that we need a national, coordinated, portfolio-integrated approach to ending homelessness and guaranteeing security of tenure for all households, particularly low-income households. The National Housing and Homelessness Plan Issues Paper is not going to cut the mustard, and our submission late last month to the Federal Department of Social Services (‘DSS’) was very much in-step with National Shelter’s submission, with some NSW-specific flavouring added in.

With more renters in our State than any other in Australia, NSW has a lot to gain by being subject (and party) to an ambitious national housing and homelessness plan. By the same token, we have a lot to lose if such a plan is not well-designed and executed.

To set the scene, our submission went hard on some of the ‘housing supply is king’ arguments flying about:

“In this submission we explicitly reject the economic framing of the housing crisis as being primarily about an overregulated and frustrated market supply; a position most prominently advanced by the Productivity Commission’s August 2022 report In need of repair: The National Housing and Homelessness Agreement. Instead, we advocate that Social and Affordable Housing (but especially social housing) should be considered as essential infrastructure, not as a residualised welfare response.”

You can read our full submission here. We have been included in post-exhibition discussions with DSS and we will continue pushing for national reforms that actually get to the heart of housing injustice in this country and in our State.