Briefs

The recent Western Australian Government report ‘Levelling the playing field' (2019) into the impact of short-term rentals (STR) such as AirBnB in Western Australia shows the conflicted nature such housing ‘sharing’ strategies bring to the local community.

The Australian bushfires of spring and summer 2019–20 have had a terrible cost in lives lost and homes destroyed. The scale of the burning is estimated at the end of January 2020 as around 5.3 million hectares in NSW (and ACT); 2.5 million hectares in Queensland; 2.1 million hectares in Western Australia; 1.5 million hectares in Victoria; 485,000 hectares in South Australia; and 36,000 hectares in Tasmania.

Functional Zero is a definitional, accounting tool designed to measure whether government services responses to homelessness are keeping pace with increases in homelessness. A program was launched in Adelaide in 2018 aimed at achieving Functional Zero homelessness in Adelaide’s central business district (CBD) by 2020.

In 2017 the Australian Government announced it would provide $10.2 million over 10 years to partner with state and territory governments to trial the use of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs). As part of that commitment SIBs funded a number of innovative programs, including ones aimed at improving housing and welfare outcomes for young people at risk of homelessness.

With increasingly unaffordable house prices in Australia’s major urban areas, many Australian local government areas (LGAs) are developing affordable housing strategies, often framed around the need for housing for low income ‘key’ workers in their neighbourhoods.