Housing, Property Politics and Planning in Australia

Australia’s efforts and policy debates around housing supply, affordability and the impacts of planning regulation, provide an interesting ‘real world’ example of the more theoretical debates about relationships between planning and the housing market, introduced in the first section of this book. Australia’s housing story is also inherently political, with the politics of home ownership and housing-related wealth jostling against the powerful interests of land developers, arguably to the detriment of lower-income renters. A climate of community hostility to socially mixed developments and developer opposition to affordable housing requirements have frustrated attempts to secure affordable housing through the planning process, whilst the national policy debate has focussed on perceived regulatory barriers to housing supply.

The following sections of this chapter chart this evolving policy and political context for urban planning and housing provision in Australia. The focus is on a shifting dialectic between government attempts to regulate urban development whilst supporting the private housing market. Four key policy episodes are highlighted in the first section of the chapter (summarised in Table 9.1). These are early settlement and land and © The Author(s) 2017

N. Gurran, G. Bramley, Urban Planning and the Housing Market, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46403-3_9

Table 9.1 Timeline of key episodes in the evolution of Australia's housing and urban planning systems

Period	Policy episodes
Early colonisation 1788-1830s 1840s	Colonial order, property speculation and city building First town plans, including minimum lot sizes and street widths (but often ignored) Building societies introduced—finance for home ownership
1850s	Rail lines in Melbourne, Sydney, enabled suburbanisation, rapid urbanisation and speculative land/housing development
1880s	Public health and sanitation laws to introduce building standards
1890s	Housing market crash
Federation-late 1970s 1912-1915	Urban reform and an absolute duty to interfere Concerns about slum housing, interest in modern town planning movement First public housing estate (Dacey Gardens, NSW)
1930s-	State housing authorities established, low-cost rental housing; some low-cost home loans
1945	Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA)— Commonwealth loans to the states for public housing, the requirement for states to undertake slum clearance and introduce modern town planning laws
1950s-	Increasing emphasis on home ownership, public housing tenants can purchase dwellings Growing reliance on 'self-build'—owner builders constructing or commissioning their own home directly
1972-	Commonwealth urban and regional development initiatives, particularly infrastructure for growth Commonwealth Land Commission Programme
1978-	Committee of Inquiry into Housing Costs—finds that planning system is creating regulatory barriers to housing development Increased targeting of public housing
1980s/1990s	Rise of environmentalism, urban consolidation agenda, era of neoliberal reform
1980s	Deregulation of home finance, followed by rapid interest rate increases Fiscal crisis in government, reduced spending on urban infrastructure
1985-87	Capital gains tax (1985), but not to family home Negative gearing (full tax deductability of expenses from investment properties, against whole income) confirmed Growing environmental agenda

(continued)

Table 9.1 (continued)

Period	Policy episodes
Early 1990s	Rise of urban consolidation, increasing inner city gentrification Residualisation of public housing, reduced (real) funding for new social housing supply
1996-	Falling interest rates Rising house prices (national housing boom 1996-2004) 50 % Capital Gains Tax discount (investment housing)
2000s-	Concern over housing affordability and new supply
2000	First Home Owner Grant (to offset effects of newly introduced Goods and Services Tax)
2007	National Housing Supply Council (NHSC) established Housing Affordability Fund (2007-2012)
2008	National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) 2008-2014
2009	National Affordable Housing Agreement 2009 (replaced the CSHA) Social Housing Initiative (Economic stimulus in response to GFC) (2009-2012)

Source: The authors

housing speculation; the post-Federation era of government intervention in housing provision; the twin movements of environmentalism and neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards; and, the re-emergence of national level concern over housing affordability from around the turn of the new millennium. The second section of this chapter outlines contemporary approaches to housing and urban policy, in part, through various inclusionary planning experiments. Potential lessons from the Australian experience in the light of the overarching housing challenges identified in Chap. 2 are highlighted in conclusion. This historically informed analysis suggests that contemporary approaches to urban planning and the housing market in Australia do reflect a certain path dependency in responding to the wider challenges to housing (rising inequality, demographic and environmental change and the structure of urban life) as discussed throughout this book.