Australia’s Housing Crisis: A Human Rights Failure with a Human Face, By James Reed and Mrs Vera West
In Australia today, the right to housing is collapsing under the weight of policy failure, economic inequity, and political inertia. This is not just a cost-of-living issue or a housing market "correction"—it is a full-blown human rights crisis that is eroding the dignity, safety, and future of thousands. Behind the statistics, there are real people—students, pensioners, single mothers, cancer patients—facing impossible choices in a country that once prided itself on the "fair go."
Julia, a full-time university student in Brisbane, is one of those people. On Youth Allowance, she cannot afford even a single room in a shared house. The rental assistance she needs is only accessible if she takes on a larger lease—one she has no means to pay. Her choices are stark: give up her education or become homeless. "I feel like everything is geared against me studying to get ahead," she says.
Julia is not alone. Cait, a single woman on JobSeeker in Sydney, has just weeks left before she is evicted. Despite years of scraping by, applying for every available rental, she faces the terrifying prospect of homelessness. "It's looking bleak," she says. "I'm thinking of setting up a crowdfund to get some help."
These are not fringe cases. According to Anglicare Australia's latest Rental Affordability Snapshot, of over 51,000 rentals surveyed across the country, only three were affordable for someone on JobSeeker. For those on Youth Allowance, none. Not one.
Tracy Adams, 63, is a trained environmental scientist, a single mother, and a cancer patient. She lives in Maleny, Queensland, and pays $300 a week in rent—60% of her income. She has just been diagnosed with bowel cancer. Her landlords, fully aware of her condition, have told her to vacate the property so they can sell. Tracy will begin chemotherapy the same week she is made homeless. "I'm trying to sell everything I own," she says. A friend has launched a fundraiser to buy her a tent or a camper van.
Tracy has applied for social housing twice and been rejected—she is not considered "disabled enough." Her case illustrates what housing advocates have long warned: that access to safe, affordable housing is increasingly rationed only to those in the most extreme distress—and even they are falling through the cracks.
Older women like Tracy are among the fastest-growing demographics facing homelessness in Australia. With limited superannuation, disrupted work histories due to caregiving, and a legacy of financial exclusion, many are hitting retirement age with no savings, no assets, and no options.
Housing expert Prof. Hal Pawson and advocacy groups like Housing for the Aged Action Group point to the predictable, systemic causes of this crisis: low wages, unaffordable private rents, and a failure to build public housing. Women in their 60s and 70s—once teachers, nurses, carers—are now sleeping in cars or crowd-funding for caravans.
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for their health and well-being, including housing. Australia has ratified treaties that affirm housing as a fundamental right—but treats it as a speculative asset. Sure, that is the UN and New World Order, but from a pragmatic point of view, if Australian law can incorporate so much woke on areas such as race, then why not health as well, until the entire framework is dismantled?
Negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts, and the outsourcing of public housing to the private sector have supercharged prices while pushing the most vulnerable off the cliff. The result? A market that serves investors, not residents.
As Anglicare's Kasy Chambers put it, "Our tax system is built to generate profit, not provide homes. And our social security system traps people in poverty instead of helping them find stability."
Australia's housing crisis is not accidental—it is engineered through decades of policy designed to inflate property values and protect the interests of those who already own homes. Fixing it will require courage and moral clarity.
Key solutions are already on the table:
End negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts that inflate housing costs
Substantially increase investment in public and community housing
Raise income supports like JobSeeker and Youth Allowance above the poverty line
Create tailored housing for older Australians, especially women
This housing emergency is not just an economic issue—it is a moral test of our national character. When a student can't afford a room, a cancer patient is evicted to boost a sale price, and a woman in her 60s is forced to beg for a van to avoid sleeping in the dirt, something is deeply broken.
Australians are told to work hard, study, plan for the future, and contribute. But for too many—especially the poor, the sick, and the aging—those values have become impossible to uphold in a system designed to exclude them.
The face of the housing crisis is not faceless. It is Julia. It is Cait. It is Tracy. And until we build a society where their basic rights are protected—not auctioned off—we are failing them, and ourselves.
"In Brisbane, student Julia (not her real name) is facing an impossible choice: drop out of full-time study, or risk homelessness.
"I want to focus on study, but I am looking at dropping to part-time so that I can work more hours. It's the only way I can live," Julia said.
With no affordable rooms available for someone on Youth Allowance in southern Queensland, and rent assistance policies that effectively penalise share house living, Julia feels trapped.
"I can't get rent assistance unless I take on a bigger lease, but that will only make things worse. I feel like everything is geared against me studying to get ahead."
In Sydney, Cait (not her real name) has just four weeks left to find a new place to live, and nowhere to go.
Single and receiving JobSeeker payments, Cait was told her lease would not be renewed due to her landlord ending the lease for family reasons.
Cait said she has struggled to keep up with rent increases for years, even though the unit she lives in is relatively affordable at $450 a week.
But finding something else she can afford has proven impossible.
"I'm trying to find somewhere to rent in Sydney but it's impossible on how much I'm living on," she said.
"I'm applying for everything I can find, but it's looking bleak. I have to be out in four weeks and I don't know where I'm going to. I'm thinking of setting up a crowdfund to get some help, but the uncertainty is very stressful."
Australia's housing crisis is the worst it has ever been
Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers
Cait's situation is far from unique.
On the weekend that Anglicare Australia conducted its annual Rental Affordability Snapshot, there were no rental listings that were affordable for people on Youth Allowance.
Surveying over 51,000 rental listings across the country, the snapshot also revealed that just 0.7 per cent of rentals were affordable for someone earning a full-time minimum wage and that just three rooms, all in share houses, were affordable for a person on JobSeeker.
"Australia's housing crisis is the worst it has ever been," said Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers.
"We keep hearing that this election is about living costs, but housing is the biggest cost facing Australians. The housing crisis is climbing the income ladder, and people on the lowest incomes don't stand a chance.
"Across the country, there are 74 electorates without a single affordable rental for someone on the minimum wage.
"For a person out of work it's even grimmer. Out of 51,000 listings across the country, just three were affordable for someone on JobSeeker."
Chambers said voters are desperate for meaningful action, but so far political parties are offering little.
"Instead, parties are promising more of the same. At best they are overlooking those who need the most help, and at worst, they are making promises that could overheat the market and push costs up."
She warned that leaving housing provision to the private market has only worsened the crisis.
"This approach is wrong, and it's supercharging rents and house prices," she said.
"These results show that housing cannot be left to the private sector. We're calling on the next parliament to ensure that rentals are affordable by building rentals people can afford, and by fixing Australia's unfair tax system."
Anglicare's Snapshot showed that there were 74 electorates without a single affordable rental for someone on the minimum wage. Source: SBS News
The report made recommendations including ending negative gearing to reduce speculative investment, redirecting resources towards building affordable housing as well as raising the rate of income payments like JobSeeker and Youth Allowance "above the poverty line so people have a realistic chance of securing a home."
"Our tax system is built to generate profit, not provide homes," Chambers said.
"And our social security system traps people in poverty instead of helping them find stability, if the next parliament fails to act, this crisis will only get worse."
"In three weeks Tracy Adams starts chemotherapy for bowel cancer. She will also be evicted from her home.
The 63-year-old has been living in her Queensland rental for five years and, despite her landlords knowing she has just been diagnosed with cancer, they have told her to go.
"A few weeks ago they gave me basically a month's notice to leave because they said they think they'll have a better chance of selling the place if it's vacant," Adams says.
"At the same time, I also got a diagnosis of bowel cancer. I have to be out of here by the 14th of May, which is also the first week I start chemo and radiation.
"I will be homeless. At the moment I am trying to sell everything I own."
The Council on the Ageing, a peak charity representing Australians aged over 50, is calling on major parties to commit to more affordable housing for elderly renters – particularly women, who are disproportionately experiencing homelessness.
Advocates warn the number of elderly women living in poverty will keep rising dramatically unless the federal government helps more.
Adams lives in Maleny, Queensland. She has a PhD and trained as an environmental scientist. But with a chronic illness, she can only work a few days a week. Complicating things further, she split from her partner and became a single parent to a child with high needs.
"I've mostly been only able to work part-time, so barely have any savings," she says.
Adams is on the disability support pension and works one day a week. She has $30,000 in super – but both these factors mean she has been rejected from social housing, despite applying twice.
"I've been turned away, [with them] saying I'm not disabled enough because their waitlists are so big," she says.
She pays $300 a week in rent – 60% of her income. There are few rentals in the area.
Desperate, her friend launched an online fundraiser to buy her a tent or, ideally, a camper van to live in.
"I've noticed that the people who are homeless, who have camper vans, they do a hell of a lot better than the ones who are just in an ordinary car or in a tent," she says.
Last year research from the University of New South Wales found a strong spike in families, people with disabilities, people in work and older women presenting at homelessness services.
"Our recent analysis confirms that homelessness involving older women is, indeed, rising much faster than homelessness across the wider population," says Prof Hal Pawson, an expert in housing policy at UNSW.
Pawson says older men fare even worse, based on growth rate data.
Of the 280,000 clients that specialist homelessness services agencies helped in 2023–24, 60% (167,000) were women. Of that group, 15,600 (9.3%) were women aged 55 or older – slightly more than the 13,900 men the same age.
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"The broader finding is that, while they continue to represent a relatively small proportion of all homeless people, the risk of homelessness is rising faster for older Australians, both men and women, than for others," Pawson says.
"That may be partly due to falling home ownership rates among people entering retirement – a trend which is only just beginning, but is expected to continue over coming decades."
Fiona York, the executive officer of Housing for the Aged Action Group, says homeless older women, or those in insecure housing, are the result of "lifetime systemic inequality".
"Women who have been in lower-paid jobs, women who have been in and out of the workforce due to family responsibilities, they've got less superannuation, less savings," York says. "Women couldn't get a home loan without a man to countersign until the 80s.
"It's all of those bigger picture issues that mean that when it comes to them being in their 70s and 80s, they're all of a sudden showing up in these statistics."
The Council on the Ageing chief executive, Patricia Sparrow, is disappointed the major parties have rarely addressed the rental crisis during this election campaign.
"There's been a lot about housing, we haven't seen much action for renters," she says.
"Over one in five older Australians are renting, and for those renting on a fixed income like the pension, the soaring cost of rent is pushing them into poverty."
The federal government needs to create more affordable housing tailored to different cohorts' needs and to increase rent assistance by 60%, she argues.
Adams is standing on the edge of the housing precipice and she knows she is not the only one.
"People tend to think that you get into homelessness because we've got addiction problems or major mental health problems, and that's just not the case for most older women."
She wants to see the government change tax settings that encourage house prices to increase, including negative gearing and cuts to capital gains tax, which according to the Australia Institute cost the budget about $20bn a year, more than twice the $8.4bn state and territory governments spent on public and community housing in 2022-23.
"That money needs to all go into the building [of homes]," she says.
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