The $40-a-fortnight boost to the jobseeker payment increases the number of affordable rentals across all of Australia from just four rooms in share houses to five.
That’s according to the Anglicare rental affordability snapshot, the Anglicare chief executive, Kasy Chambers, told the National Press Club on Tuesday. The 2023 snapshot, released before the federal budget last month, analysed 46,000 rental properties across Australia, based on whether rent would cost more than 30% of the household budget for various low-income households.
Chambers was speaking as part of a panel on housing affordability in regional Australia. She said when Anglicare began its rental affordability snapshot 10 years ago, there was a belief that regional areas were more affordable.
“That wasn’t the truth then and it certainly isn’t now,” she said.
Some regions are worse off than others: in central Queensland, she said, only nine of the 397 rental listings analysed in the report were affordable for a couple with two children who both lived on jobseeker, and on the New South Wales north coast, only 8% of rental listings were affordable for a couple who had two children and both worked full-time in minimum-wage jobs.
“We do not see affordable housing in regions any more,” she said. “You’re in effect buying the number of available jobs through the price of your rent or mortgage.”
Chambers said skyrocketing rents in regional areas were having flow-on effects on other services such as aged care, as pensioners living in private rentals decided to move into residential aged care facilities earlier than they otherwise might because they cannot keep pace with rent.
She called for a return to fully publicly funded social and affordable housing, rather than relying on the private sector and schemes such as negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions and commonwealth rent assistance.
“We now spend more commonwealth dollars per capita on those three payments than we ever did on housing, and yet housing affordability has never been lower,” she said. “Anyone can see that this approach is failing.”
Anna Neelagama, the chief executive of the Real Estate Institute of Australia, and the independent MP for Indi, Helen Haines, were also on the panel.
Neelagama said house prices and rental supply issues in regional Australia had cooled since 2021 and were now back at pre-pandemic levels, but that had not resulted in an increase in the number of affordable rentals available.
She suggested the federal government use some of the $60m allocated under the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement to pay local governments to write to ratepayers in an effort to get “empty or latent homes” back in the permanent rental pool.
“The Eurobodalla shire on the south coast did this and successfully got 18 new properties back into their rental pool,” she said.
Neelagama also suggested an audit of land and houses owned by state and territory governments, to free up any police or teachers’ houses that were standing empty and government-owned land which was being land-banked and not developed.
She suggested Australia should also look at prefabricated or modular homes – “any homes we can get in the ground quickly” – as a way to house key workers.
Haines said there had been a 67% increase in the number of people homeless in Wangaratta, a regional Victorian service town at the heart of her electorate, since 2016. She described meeting a man she called Richard who was using the shower block at a public park and lives in a tent after a relationship breakdown and mental health challenges. He is a qualified chef in a region that relies on tourism and where hospitality workers are in high demand, but his housing situation has made finding a job “completely impossible”.
“The lack of affordable housing in Indi has consequential flow-on economic impacts,” Haines said. “Whenever I speak to a business owner, they tell me they’re unable to fill job vacancies because people cannot find anywhere to live.”
