News

Although Australia and Germany both exempt owner-occupied housing from capital gains and provide for negative gearing in the private rental sector, in Australia it underlies speculative inflation, while in Germany house prices are relatively steady due to a large private rental sector, low population growth, conservative lending by public financial institutions and rent regulations, AHURI research has revealed.

The National Agreement on Closing the Gap has for the first time included housing among its 16 key national socio-economic targets to improve life outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The targets in the refreshed strategy work across the following outcome areas: education, employment, health and wellbeing, justice, safety, housing, land and waters, and languages.

Almost 1.5 million new homes were built in Australian in the 10 years from 2006 to 2016 but the growth of housing stock in each state and territory was uneven, ranging from 26 per cent in Western Australia to just 12 per cent in New South Wales, new AHURI research reveals. Only the building boom of 2015 to 2018 pushed NSW to reach supply levels comparable with other states.

The Victorian Government has announced a new $150 million transitional housing scheme to help over 2000 people experiencing homelessness access emergency accommodation in vacant hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic and then to transition to stable, long term housing after April 2021.

Despite a host of disruptive new technologies entering Australia’s transport ecosystem, our planning, urban design, infrastructure and transport frameworks remain mired in a twentieth-century policy-making mindset. A new report from researchers at RMIT, Curtin and Swinburne Universities, undertaken for AHURI, shows contemporary policy-making is not geared toward innovation resulting in significant opportunity costs for the nation.