HOUSING STRATEGY FALLS SHORT As Hal Pawson and Vivienne Milligan discuss, the NSW government’s new 20-year housing strategy gives a broad nod to issues at play while offering few actionable solutions.
ith a transition from stamp duty to land tax flagged in treasurer Dominic Perrottet’s 2020 NSW budget it appeared that the state could be on the brink of major housing system reform. Compounding this impression, was the recent release of the government’s Housing 2041 strategy and 2021-22 action plan. The state’s first-ever long-sighted housing strategy (emulating Western Australia and the ACT) is a welcome recognition of housing as both a major continuing challenge and a core policy responsibility of state and territory governments. In its scope and aspirations the document refreshingly recognises the range of agencies, powers and policy actions available to state governments to achieve a better functioning and fairer housing system. As well as mooting the stamp duty reform, for
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example, it contemplates amending planning guidelines to promote housing diversity and sustainability; stronger consumer protection and support for tenants; “maximising the impact of government-owned land to achieve the housing vision”; and “rejuvenating” social housing. Another positive inclusion is new governance and coordination arrangements — including an expert housing advisory panel and a housing strategy implementation unit. These could help to confront the policymaking challenge posed by housing as a manyfaceted issue badly served by silo government. These strengths apart, though, how convincing are the documents as a genuine strategy? Qualities fundamental to the credibility of any meaningful strategy include: analysis of the problems to be tackled, setting clear and measurable goals, identifying actions to achieve those goals, and a plan for mobilising resources to implement the specified actions.
16 | Inner Sydney Voice | Winter 2021 | innersydneyvoice.org.au
Regrettably, few of those features appear in the Housing 2041 documents. First, they include no precise analysis of current housing market conditions, nor any quantification of existing unmet housing needs and housing system performance challenges. Second, detailed modelling of demographic forecasts, population structure and inter/intra-regional migration is absent. Such projections are essential in planning housing supply targets, and never more so following the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, lacking concrete analysis as its foundation, stated strategy goals are extremely high-level in nature. This is revealed by a motherhood vision for NSW to “have housing that supports security, comfort, independence and choice for all people at all stages of their lives” to be achieved via one-word “pillars”: supply, diversity, affordability and resilience. Under these headlines, there is little or nothing in the way of definitive
