Yet again, as a federal election approaches, we look set for a national debate in which competing housing policy offers will take centre stage. The Greens began to unveil their pitch back in 2024 and the Coalition has now started to follow suit.
But while Labor’s 2025 election housing package remains under wraps, it’s timely to take stock of the Albanese Government’s housing record during the current Parliamentary term. How much of the 2022 platform has been delivered and to what effect? And what might we hope has been learned from this experience about the policy pitch needed for the future?
Labor’s 2022 commitments
Labor took power in 2022 with a sizeable raft of housing policy commitments, most of which have been subsequently delivered, at least to the extent of passing necessary legislation. Foremost among these has been the Housing Australia Future Fund. This is the government’s flagship social and affordable housing investment program involving $500 million annual expenditure and intended to create 30,000 new homes by 2029.
Also successfully passed into law, albeit in the dying days of the 2022 Parliament, were the Build to Rent Tax Reform package to boost good quality market rental housing construction, and the Help to Buy first home ownership initiative.
Also in the home ownership policy realm, the government pragmatically followed through on a pledge to not only retain, but expand the Morrison Government’s First Home Guarantee scheme enabling first-home buyer access to low-deposit mortgages. The annual ceiling for Home Guarantee allocations was upped to 50,000; this within the context of total yearly first home buyer transactions of around 120,000.
Likewise, the government has delivered on 2022 election pledges to restore cabinet status for the Federal housing minister portfolio, as well as to establish the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council as an expert advisory body, and Housing Australia as the national housing delivery agency.
In a similar vein, the restoration of the national Housing and Homelessness Ministers forum, previously dormant for five years, has importantly aided joint working across the two levels of government.
New commitments advanced during the Parliament
Beyond this, largely initiated by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, the Albanese Government also advanced numerous housing measures additional to those pledged at the last election. The most notable has been the National Housing Accord negotiated with state and territory governments and other stakeholders in 2022.
Inspired by an understanding that stepped-up housing supply is essential to ease broader housing affordability pressures, the NHA is a federally-led process in which all Australian Governments and others agreed in 2022 to help facilitate expanded housebuilding towards a target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029.
Boosted housebuilding is anticipated as mainly flowing from NHA-triggered state/territory land-use planning reforms, incentivised by the $3 billion New Home Bonus federal government fund, and also aided through the $500 million Housing Support Fund for enabling infrastructure. A more direct contribution to achieving the 1.2 million target is the $350 million committed in direct funding for 10,000 affordable rental homes over five years (additional to the HAFF).
Among other significant and previously unheralded housing initiatives seen during the current Parliament has been the substantial boost to Rent Assistance enacted in budgets 2023 and 2024. In combination with routine indexation, these have pushed up RA payment ceilings by 45% since 2022.
Then there has been the one-off $2 billion Social Housing Accelerator capital investment program as initiated in 2023, creating perhaps about 4000 new homes; and the $1 billion expansion of the National Housing Infrastructure Facility in 2024.
A final measure to be mentioned among those emerging during the 2022 Parliament is the $800 million Social Housing Energy Performance Initiative, set to fund retrofitting of 100,000 social housing dwellings (nearly a quarter of the national portfolio) by 2029.
A glaring omission
There is, however, one especially glaring omission from the list of housing commitments initiated or ticked off since 2022, namely the failure to publish Australia’s first ever National Housing and Homelessness Plan, as pledged at the last election; an initiative with the stated aspiration to “…set out a 10-year national vision, across the responsibilities of different levels of government, to help guide future housing and homelessness policy”.
It would be hoped that a strategy of this kind could fulfil the fundamental need for a clearly argued and evidence-based statement of medium- and long-term housing policy objectives, and for an overarching rationale to integrate recent and emerging initiatives. As such, the Plan could have formed the single most transformative housing policy action of the 2022-25 Parliament, especially if underpinned in law.
Regrettably, though, while it advanced in 2023-24 and without trace, this breached election promise is a serious blot on the Albanese Government’s housing record.
Policy impacts
Strategy publication failure aside, the initiatives actioned since 2022 indicate a government that could hardly be accused of complacency or inaction. But what of the outcomes and impacts?
Perhaps most positively, higher Rent Assistance ceilings fed through quickly into social security incomes in 2023 and 2024, substantially softening the impact of raging 2022-25 rent inflation for qualifying tenants. In combination with other factors, this helped to reduce the proportion of RA income recipients paying unaffordable rents from 44% to 39% over the period.
When it comes to new investment programs, though, achieving measurable outcomes within the span of a three-year Parliamentary term is quite a stretch when we are talking about a product that necessarily takes years to plan, commission and construct – even when funded.
So it was never realistic to imagine that the HAFF/NHA social and affordable rental initiatives would generate new product during the current Parliament; and, in fact, quite an achievement that the first 91 projects flagged as creating more than 8000 homes had been assessed and funded by Housing Australia by March 2025.
Beyond that, with an unholy alliance of Coalition and Greens senators blocking parliamentary approval for Labor’s Help to Buy and Build to Rent measures for much of 2024, the chances of concrete resulting actions flowing through from those initiatives before the 2025 poll were also nil.
Problems of a very different kind have compounded the challenge of enabling stepped-up market housing production in line with the NHA 1.2 million new homes target.
Simplifying planning without compromising essential objectives is always a worthy aspiration. But, far from being due to inadequate planning approvals, the continued low level of apartment construction during the early 2020s has very largely resulted from hostile market conditions: project viability undermined by construction cost inflation and supply chain constraints. Symptomatic of this situation, in Sydney alone, by late 2024 some 75,000 dwellings had been approved by the planning department but not yet commenced.
Assessing Labor’s overall record
After a decade of federal complacency and neglect, the past three years have seen a huge upsurge of housing policymaking energy under the Albanese Government. Though the fruits of this commitment will be largely seen only during the next Parliamentary term, it is a creditable record.
At the same time, there are legitimate questions on how far recent initiatives measure up against the scale of problems such as the 640,000 households experiencing unmet need for social and affordable housing, and the increasingly common sight of tented homelessness and rough sleeping in our major cities. Seriously confronting these issues calls for a step change during the next Parliament.
Similarly, while unprecedented increases in Rent Assistance maximum payments since 2023 can be celebrated for protecting many low-income tenants, the incidence of rental stress remains extremely high, even when these higher rates are factored in. There is an evidence-based case for the payment’s further expansion and its structural reform.
And, for all the government’s 2022-25 housing hyperactivity, very few of its initiatives can be accurately described as involving genuine “reform”. Most egregiously absent, of course, has been any commitment to re-balance distortionary housing tax settings; especially the ongoing annual multi-million-dollar giveaway to private landlords that contributes to Australia’s over-expensive housing and damagingly speculative market behaviour.
It must be idealistically hoped that these issues will be confronted in a National Housing and Homelessness Plan to emerge in the next Parliament.
Hal Pawson is Professor Housing Research and Policy, and Associate Director of the City Futures Research Centre, UNSW.