Submission on Tasmanian Housing Strategy

AHURI welcomes this opportunity to comment on the Tasmanian Housing Strategy discussion paper. This submission responds to the questions posed in the discussion paper, and points to relevant AHURI research that is relevant to the strategy.

The submission rightly canvases a range of key housing issues facing Tasmania, from rapid population growth, high rates of low income households, dispersed social housing across regional areas, an older and ageing population and increasing population living with disabilities. Issues of particular relevance for Tasmania that could be better covered include:

• The regional dimension of the ageing of population, including towns in the northern part of Tasmania and how this is managed (for relevant AHURI research see Li et al. 2022).
• The permanence or otherwise of migration to regional locations due to COVID related factors (Baker and Daniels 2020), and the recovery of housing markets following COVID (Verdouw et al. 2021).
• The role of tourism in the Tasmanian economy and the rise of the short-term rental market, which has reduced the availability of private rental housing for longer term tenants (Phibbs and Ely 2022).
• Trends in homelessness in Tasmania, which have increased from 2006 to 2016, centring particularly on Hobart and north-eastern Tasmania (Parkinson et al. 2019).